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Macaron's avatar
Macaron
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 10, 2016

Migration of MS NLB to F5 Big IP

I have currently two load balancers one is Microsoft NLB and other is F5.

 

We are planning to phase out MS NLB and configure application that are on MS NLB to F5.

 

My question is what are steps that i have to take for this? Also are there any F5 migration tool that i can use to do this job? any other recommendation please ? Thanks

 

Faheem

 

APM
application delivery
BIG-IP
devops

4 Replies

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  • Josiah_39459's avatar
    Josiah_39459
    Historic F5 Account
    Feb 11, 2016

    I am not aware of any migration tool, F5 or third party, so you will likely be rebuilding your config by hand. The manual is a great place for this, and there is also video training on f5.learn.com

     

  • Kai_Wilke's avatar
    Kai_Wilke
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Feb 11, 2016

    Hi Faheem,

     

    we have migrated a some NLB cluster to F5, the points below are outlining the migration steps we have used...

     

    1. Add additional DIPs to the NLB nodes so that each application on each node can be accessed using DIPs.
    2. Add network bindings to the application pointing to the new DIPs
    3. Configure the F5 environment, add interfaces, add IPs, create Virtual Servers (to migrate the VIPs), create pools (for each application), create nodes (for each DIP on each Node), create health-monitors, etc.
    4. Test the F5 environment using HOST entries pointing to the new F5 Virtual Servers.
    5. Reroute the NLB VIP traffic to the F5 by either using DNS, certain NATs or step-by-step migration for each single VIP.
    6. Remove the NLB configuration from the Hosts.
    7. Done!

    Note: Depending on the detailed implemetation of your NLB clusters, and the desired F5 configuration certain additional steps may be required...

     

    Cheers, Kai

     

  • Aussie_David_23's avatar
    Aussie_David_23
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Mar 29, 2017

    We have successfully used the ansible F5 module and powershell to detect all running NLB clusters and migrate to a production F5 instance. It worked really well, produced very consistent config and provided for one-command rollback for the client.

     

    I've described the process and provided code snippets in this blog post Replacing Windows NLB with F5 using ansible[1] in the hope that it helps others.

     

    Cheers,

     

    David

     

    1: https://blog.tidalmigrations.com/replacing-windows-nlb-with-f5-using-ansible-effac02a9861