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Ronald_Nutter's avatar
Ronald_Nutter
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Nov 12, 2019

Looking for F5 BIG-IP One Arm Deployment Guide

Working with the F5 BIG-IP VM eval in my home lab so I can add to my skills to move up to better job.

 

Have been looking for a deployment guide or how to on deploying BIG-IP in one arm mode.

Found one item on the internet but it must have been for an earlier version because the CLI commands were rejected.

 

If I could at least have the management and external interfaces on the same subnet, that would help.

 

Any assistance is appreciated,

Ron

application delivery
BIG-IP

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  • Philip_Jonsson's avatar
    Philip_Jonsson
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Nov 12, 2019

    Hey Ron

     

    What you're basically asking for is a Single-NIC Deployment which is quite common in Cloud deployments (Azure, AWS etc.). This can be done for local VMs as well and here is a complete guide on how to deploy it from an ESXi perspective.

     

    https://techdocs.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/bigip-ve-setup-vmware-esxi-13-0-0/1.html

     

    In order to turn your BIG-IP into a Single-NIC deployment is to delete interfaces 2,3 and 4, leaving you only with the first one. This kind of goes outside of how a normal BIG-IP is being deployed and changes how it behaves. For instance, you cannot configure it in an HA mode in a Single-NIC deployment. Usually you have one interface for management, one for internal and one for external. The last one can be used for HA but I usually just run it over the internal interface.

     

    I have a guide of the traditional setup on the old DevCentral site:

     

    https://devcentral.f5.com/s/question/0D51T00006i7jCSSAY/lab-guide-how-to-build-your-own-f5-lab-environment

     

    It has links to the back-end server that you can load-balance to and a Linux "Jumphost" for MGMT and External access.

     

    My guide runs the whole environment locally on your computer and can be set up within minutes.

     

    I'm curious, what requires you to deploy it in a Single-NIC (one-arm) mode?

    • Ronald_Nutter's avatar
      Ronald_Nutter
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Nov 12, 2019

      At this point, it is a matter of simplicity. While I would prefer to deploy with 4 physical interfaces, I will need to purchase a manged switch to allow me to break out the individual interfaces. If I am going to do that, I may think about purchasing a used server with multiple interfaces instead.

      • boneyard's avatar
        boneyard
        Icon for MVP rankMVP
        Nov 16, 2019

        in principle you can manage the system on the external interfaces (look at port lockdown), not best practice but for testing that is possible.