Creating an F5 BigIP Virtual Lab

0:00So let's spend a few minutes taking a look at our F5 - 101 - Lab Topology, because we're gonna build this out in an ESXi host. And you can do this in a VMware workstation or VMware player or Hyper-V, or whatever virtualized environment you want to use because F5 does provide several different types of their virtual appliance for different environments. So we're gonna see that too. So let's start with looking at our lab here. And the idea is that we have three separate networks.

0:36So, we'll say three nets over here. And let's start by looking at what those are. So over here, this area here with the F5 BIG-IP being the center of our topology. This area here, that is our external or WAN portion of our lab. So this external/WAN subnet or network, uses the 172.16.101.0/24 subnet, all right?

1:12That is that portion of the network. And in that portion of the network, we have a Windows host here, and that is our test host. So we're gonna use that to test accessing services behind our F5 BIG-IP. So we're gonna go from this device here to Windows operating system. We're gonna be accessing services. So that's what that is for. All right, so let me remove a little bit of that. There we go. Now let's talk about our second network. So this is our first network.

1:43I'm gonna make a division there. Let's go with our second one. Our second one was over here on the right, and let's put a box around that. That is our management network. So two is our management, and that is using 192.168.121.0/24 subnet. And that is actually where we're going to be accessing the internet from our F5 device.

2:13So that's the only way the F5 can access the internet, and that's how we're setting this up, so that we can go out and we can register our licenses, we can get updates and do that kind of things through the management network. Then we have one more, as you can see. And this last one is here on the inside or the internal interface of our F5 appliance. So three is internal or we're also gonna refer to it as LAN because it's the LAN side of our network, and it uses the 10.10.101.0/24 subnet.

2:51So those are our three different networks that we're going to need to build and use within our environment. And actually, we're not gonna build the management network, it's already built. It's just my basic LAN here in the lab. So we're actually gonna build out our WAN, our external, and our internal LAN, so that we can use that. Now, let me go ahead and clear some of this off of here now that we see the three different networks. And let's talk about the F5 itself. So here in the center, we have our F5 appliance, and we can see that Interface 1.1 here is going to be our external or WAN interface, and we have an IP address associated with it, and we see a word "floating" over here.

3:36Now, floating is an IP address, a floating IP, that is shared amongst multiple F5 BIG-IP devices, okay? So when we're doing an HA deployment or a high availability, where we have more than one BIG-IP devices here, well, those act as a pair. And this floating IP actually runs on both of them so that when you're connecting to it, either one can respond as a pair.

4:06So, this provides this high availability and redundancy. That's what that floating is for. Then over here on the inside, we have Interface 1.2. That's our internal or LAN interface. We see the IP address associated with it and the floating IP. And then of course down here, we have our management network as well. Now, we had already seen our external Windows test host that we're gonna use to perform testing of accessing services through our F5. But over here, down at the bottom, we also have three web servers.

4:40These are all Linux web servers that we're going to use to load balance between and perform other activities and services. So we see that there. So we do have three of those that we're gonna need to set up as well. And I'm gonna show you where you can download an image that already has those ready to go, so you can just deploy the image, makes it very fast and efficient. And your Windows host, you don't have to use a Windows host when we're talking about our test machine up here at the top. You can use any operating system that provides you a desktop with a web browser. So you could run a Linux desktop on there if you wanted to, or you can use a Windows demo license like I've done in my lab environment.

5:15So, we're gonna have to set up a couple of these networks, we're gonna have to set up our three web servers, we're gonna have to set up a Windows host or a Linux desktop of your choice, whatever you want to use. And then of course, we're gonna have to deploy our F5 device and we're gonna use all these addresses, and we're gonna go through this. So no big deal there. But it's gonna be pretty fun, I'm excited about setting up this lab with y'all. So now that we know what the topology looks like, let's go ahead and continue with setting up the lab in the next nugget.

0:00All right, here we are. We are on a website. We're at my f5.com And that's where you need to go to start out and follow along here So now that we know what we're going to be setting up in our lab, we need to do a couple things we need to Go ahead and sign up for an account if you don't already have them with my f5. com So you'll come over here click on sign in and If you don't have an account You'll go down here to sign up and go ahead and go through the process of setting up your account, but I already have one So I'm gonna sign in here. There we go next and sign in Alright now I am signed in and we need to do this so that we can download our virtual image of our big IP virtual appliance and Get a trial license as well so we can install and use it So the first thing we're to do is go ahead and download our image So what we're gonna do we're gonna go up here to Resources and then go down to downloads. There we go and in order download product software You have to accept the terms and conditions. So we'll go ahead and do that and say next Now I need to select a family. I'm gonna go with big IP. That's what I want to use Then we're gonna come down here to select a product line. We're gonna go down

1:15here to big IP version 17.x That's the latest of the team-os Operating system here the traffic management operating system So we're gonna go ahead and click that then you'll select your product version over here on the right once it finishes that We'll go to 17.1 getting the latest version. All right super now What we're gonna do is scroll down here and we're looking for virtual edition over here on the right. So right there There's one 17 1 0 2 virtual edition So let's go ahead and grab that and we're gonna click on that and what that does is we're selecting the virtual edition of the F5 Appliance the big IP and we're grabbing the latest version of that perfect virtual edition. There we go. So now we're gonna scroll on down So we scroll down here to select and download file now the easiest way to do this search for VMware So I'm gonna do control F to search. I'm gonna type in VMware. There we go. We 're looking for right here this image file set For VMware ESXi server. That's our 17 1 0 2. This is key here all ALL that's because it will include all the different modules because if you select Something other than that actually will scroll down and I'll show you

2:32Let's see if we go down here to just LTM that LTM is our local traffic manager only it doesn't have the other module So we don't want that one the other thing is this one slot you see that that means there is one Bootable slot so you can't upgrade This so we don't want that either. We want this one right here big IP 17 1 0 2 all VMware OVA. That's exactly what we want So I'm gonna click on that and then we're going to go ahead and scroll all the way down here Then we're going to select our location I'm gonna say us east coast and then I would click right here on this download now You select your location whichever one closes to you and you go ahead and download that but I've already done that So we don't have to but that's what you're gonna download so that is our OVA file that's our virtual image for our virtual big IP device So once you've done that you have it we need a trial license So now let's go ahead and grab that. Oh, but wait there's something else. I want to show you real quick Let's go back down here to the downloads. So what I want to show you is that there are other options So let's see if I'm scrolling through here We saw VMware ESXI but if you're wanting to spin this up in KVM red hat boom there you go That is your image set for KVM and here's image file set for Microsoft hyper V

3:52in case you want to do it in hyper V So you don't have to use the anywhere as I said earlier You can use something else if you want to and you can actually use GNS3 as well If you go to the GNS3 marketplace, they have a big IP image available for use there as well So either way you can grab your image that you want so but we still have to grab a trial license Let's go back up to the top and let's go ahead and do that So I'm gonna go to my products and plans and we'll go to trials right there come down here And this is what we want right here. We're gonna say big IP VE and big IQ VE That's a VE is our virtual edition and this is a 30-day trial and you can actually do two of these I think within a 12-month period so you can get 60 days here So I'm already tried one. I'm gonna grab another trial though here so I'm gonna say start another trial and here I want you to deal with export compliance because these Systems do use cryptography and there are laws against exporting various types of cryptography Says are you downloading this software for a non-US government entity?

4:57What we do is go down here and select no I am not downloading on behalf of a government entity go ahead and hit save Because we're doing this in a lab environment. This isn't gonna be production So as there goes setting up your trials might take a few minutes So we're gonna give that a couple minutes to finish that up and then we'll continue okay finished and Offers me some other trials here, but if I scroll down to my trials now I can see I have an active status on a big IP VE. That's we're gonna be using a trial So if I click on that and go into it here, let this load up It's gonna give me some information such as downloading the latest version installing the software and Doing all those wonderful things, but this is what we're interested in here the registration key That's right. So here we're gonna be looking at the big IP virtual edition licenses and it gives us two of them here and that's because we may want to set up two in an HA or high availability pair So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna leave this up for now because that wraps up this nugget We've downloaded our image for our big IP and we've got a license in the next day We're gonna start building out a virtual environment. So I'll see you there

6:14[BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00All right, here we are. We're on our VMware ESXi lab host, as you can see. And what we're gonna start off with is creating our networking. Pretty simple. Remember, we're building two networks. So if I jump back here real quick, this is our topology. We needed to build out our WAN network, our external network, and our LAN network, our internal network, because the management, and I said we were gonna just stick that on our standard lab network so we don't have to build anything there, okay? And so let's go ahead and do that. So let's jump back over here.

0:31All right, super. So we're gonna go to networking and you'll see I have F5 WAN virtual switch. These are virtual switches. And I have an F5 LAN virtual switch. So you'll need to create those two. So we're gonna walk through and show you how to create one if you're not familiar with it. So just do add standard virtual switch, bada-bing, bada-bang. We give it a name, "F5 WAN", something like this. And now here, this is the key for the uplinks, We don't need any uplinks. This is our physical ethernet interface on our VMware box.

1:01I don't need that because remember these two, the WAN and the LAN don't have any internet connectivity. So I don't need to assign an uplink port to them. And so then I would just simply say add, and it would create that. And I need to do that for both the LAN and the WAN. Then we need to go over to port groups. We need to create an F5 WAN port group and an F5 LAN port group. So what I would do is just simply add port group. There we go. Give it a name and we're gonna call this, let's just say "F5 WAN", that works. You can add a VLAN ID, but we don't need to.

1:33We're not dealing with VLANs. And then for your V switch, you'd come down here and attach it to your F5 WAN V switch. And then that's all you have to do. Now for the LAN, we would do F5 LAN as the name of the port group. Come down here and attach it to the F5 LAN virtual switch. There we go and that creates our networking. And I said with our management network, we're gonna attach to the just standard VM network. And here it's the VM network port group, which is tied to the vSwitch0 up here.

2:05And so that's just your default name when you first set up VMware ESXi, you have a vSwitch0 with a VM Network port group. So that's setting up our network for this. So that's all we have to do in this nugget. Just go ahead and set those up because when we go ahead and deploy our big IP in the next nugget, we're gonna have to have these networks ready and available so we can assign them to the interfaces on our big IP. So I'll see you there shortly.

0:00All right, here we are back in our VMware ESXi host, and we're in our virtual networking where we set up our virtual networks, our F5 WAN and LAN environments, our vSwitch and port group, and we did that in the last nugget. So now let's go ahead and deploy our BIG-IP. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna go up here to Virtual Machines, and we're gonna go to Create Register VM. There we go. And we're gonna select Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA, because we downloaded the OVA file from F5. So I'm gonna select that. I'm gonna say Next, and enter a name.

0:31We're gonna call this BIGIP-1. There we go, super duper. I'm gonna see, let's go to here, I can click on this and go and find the OVA file I downloaded, or I can drag it up there, so that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go ahead and drag that up. There we go. That is what we had downloaded. I'm gonna say Next. I'm gonna select the data store where I want that to reside. I only have one data store, so it's gonna reside there. And here we have the EULA, so I need to go ahead and read through this and make sure I agree to it, and then click I agree, then I'll say Next.

1:07Now here we go. So for network mappings, this is our Management, Internal, External, and HA, or High Availability. So what I'm going to do here is select my Management Network, and that is gonna be just my standard VM network. I'm gonna select my Internal. That's gonna be our F5 LAN. Our External is gonna be our F5 WAN. And then our HA, or High Availability, what I'm gonna do is just set that to F5 LAN. There we go, and super duper.

1:38Now for Deployment Type, number of CPUs and RAM, I'm just gonna leave as default. This is a lab environment. We're not pushing these things hard. For Disk Provisioning, I'm gonna leave it at Thin. That's fine. You can do Thick if you want to. Power On Automatically. I'm gonna turn that off, though. And I'm gonna say Next, super, and I'm gonna say Finish. And at this point, it's gonna go ahead and start deploying our device. We see BIG-IP is already listed down here at the bottom, and right now, we can see down here if we look under Upload Disk right here, it's going and it's gonna go through and do that.

2:12It's gonna take a little while, and once it's finished, I'm gonna go ahead and pause this video here, but once it's finished, I'll come back, and we'll do the initial configuration via the command-line interface on this BIG-IP device. So I'll see you back here when this finishes its deployment. All right, my deployment has successfully completed. Super. So I'm gonna go over here to the BIGIP-1. I've already got that checked there, so I'm gonna check that, and we're going to go ahead and do a Power On. All right, super. I'm gonna click on BIGIP-1 here, so I can go into that page and open this up.

2:44There we go, and you can see here that it's booting up our F5 BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition, and we'll just give this a few minutes to boot up and I'll be back. All right. It has booted up. So what we're gonna do now is gonna go ahead and log in. The default credentials are root. Hit Enter. And the word default. There we go. Now let's see. I need to enter my current password, which is the default password of default, D-E-F-A-U-L-T.

3:18Hit Enter. New BIG-IP password. I'm gonna put one in. There we go. Bad password. It's based on a dictionary word. So don't use a dictionary word. (laughs) There. Let's try that one. And that one. There we go. Super. So it says my admin user password has been changed. All right. Excellent. And you'll see here now that it shows that we are in the config #, so we're in the config mode. So I'm gonna type config, hit Enter, and it's going to bring up a wizard for me to go through to set this up.

3:53Just some basics here. So I'm gonna say OK. And select IPv4 or 6. I'm gonna go with IPv4. All right, now it comes up and it asks me what I want to use for my IP address. It says use automatic configuration, which means DHCP. I'm gonna say No. Because I want to manually configure this. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. And the address is 192.168.121.something. So here we're doing our management IP address. So keep that in mind. So I'm gonna go over here to our lab topology.

4:26And our management network is 192.168.121.11. So let's go back now. Let's put that in there, 11. There we go. Say OK. And my subnet mask. Yes, that is perfect. Default class C. Enter. And my current route, my default gateway is 192.168.121.1. Yes, I want to keep that. So I'll say yes. And go over here and hit OK. Super. Now my system management connectivity says it'll be lost if you're changing the address.

5:00Do you want to save these settings? Yes. Enter. And now it's gonna go through and it's going to apply these settings. And there we go. It's finished. And I can hit Enter now. I'm out of this wizard kind of mode. But what we want to do now is we want to use the ifconfig | more command. And that pipe, if you're not familiar with this, it's usually right below your Delete key. So we're gonna hit Enter. And there it's gonna give us our ifconfig information. And what we're looking for is down here under management.

5:33So if you look all the way down here at the bottom, the management interface is showing the INET address is 192.168.121.11. And that is absolutely correct. So that's working for us. So now that that's configured, we should be able to, I'm gonna go ahead and close this out. There we go. And I'm gonna open up a web browser here, a new tab. I'm gonna put in here https://192.168.121.11. Hit Enter.

6:06And say yes, advance. Go ahead and proceed to this. And there we are. We are now connected to our BIG-IP configuration utility. So that's our BIG-IP management interface. Now in the next nugget, we're going to go through and configure this thing, all right? So I will see you there shortly.

0:00All right, now it's time to log into our BIG-IP appliance and go ahead and do some basic config. So here, we are connected to 192.168.121.1, because that's the IP address of the management interface. We put in admin as the username, and the password's gonna be whatever we set in the last nugget when we went ahead and configured a password. So I'm gonna put that in, and there it goes. I need to put that password in again, 'cause it's gonna make me change it again. Okay. And then come down here and put in a new password.

0:31And confirm that. Super. And go ahead and click Save. All right, "Password changed successfully," is what it's shown here. So now I'm gonna log in with my new password, admin and the new password. Excellent. Say Log in. And super. Now we are here and let's look at this for a minute. Now at the very top we've got a message here. It says, "No license exists for this device." So that means we need to put a license in, and we're gonna do that. So the first thing we're gonna do, we are in the Welcome, Setup Utility.

1:02So we're gonna go through this Setup Utility. But before that I want you to take a look at the top left here. We have a host name, bigip1. We got our IP address. We have a date and time up here, the user that's logged in, and the role of the user, pretty good. That's some information you should be familiar with if you ever need to reference it. So let's go ahead and click Next on this Setup Utility. There we go, super. Now it says license not activated. Let's go ahead and activate a license. Let's get our trial license. So here we go. It's now asking for our registration key.

1:33So I'm gonna jump back over to the F5 website, there we go, where we've got our license key. So I'm gonna grab that first one for our BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I'm gonna grab that. Super. I'm gonna go back over to my BIG-IP. I'm gonna paste that in, just like that. Super. And you can add additional keys if you'd like to, but we're not gonna do that. For your Activation Method, we're gonna do Automatic, requires outbound connectivity, which is fine, means it's gonna reach out to F5 and make sure everything's okay.

2:04So your Outbound Interface, need to make sure this is set to our management interface. That's how we have it configured in the lab. All right, and license comparison, we're not gonna do that for now. We're just gonna say Next. So right now it's receiving config data from your device, communicating out to F5. So we're gonna give that a minute to go ahead and do its communications. All right, there it went, it communicated out. Now we have to accept the EULA. So let's go ahead and do that. Accept. It's gonna go ahead and communicate outbound again. And now it says our BIG-IP system configuration has changed.

2:35So what's happening is it's gonna go ahead and do a utility update. So we're gonna let that do that, and then we'll be back when that finishes. All right, it has finished with that. So we can go ahead and click on Continue, and we'll continue with our setup utility. And this is a resource provisioning page. We see Resource Provisioning up here, and we can see there's a whole bunch of stuff in here. And right now we're looking at our local traffic manager, LTM. There's our management.

3:05The provisioning is set to small. Down here, you can set to dedicated, nominal, and minimum. So we're gonna leave that at nominal for now, and we're not using these others just yet. So we're gonna leave all of that just like it is. And we're going to go ahead and click on Next. Super. Now once that goes ahead and finishes out, it's taking us to the next page. And this is dealing with our certificates. So the certificate name is server.crt, gives you your localhost, and gives you some information about your certificates.

3:36We don't need to do anything here. So we'll click Next. And here we have some general settings. So we see the IP information that we set up earlier. This is our management information. This is our Management Config IPV4. That's exactly what that is. And our IPV6 is set to DHCP. That's fine. We should go ahead and give it a host name. So let's do that. Let's call this bigip1.f5lab.int for internal. There we go, perfect. That's just our local host name.

4:09The host IP address. It says Use Management Port IP Address. We're gonna leave that. For your time zone, go ahead and select your time zone. So I need to find mine, right there. That's the closest one. Super. There we go. Now for your user administration SSH Access is enabled. You can actually disable login for the root account if you'd like to. Now for SSH IP Allow, right now it's set to all IP addresses, but you can select a specific range. We're gonna leave it at all IP addresses, 'cause this is lab. And then Disable External Monitors, I'm not gonna deal with that right now.

4:42So we're gonna go ahead and say Next. Gonna let that load up, and oh, I forgot the root account. You do have to set the root account password. So let's go ahead and put in our password for that. And I'm just using the same password I use for my web login. There we go, super. Now we'll click Next. Now we have two areas here. Your Standard Network Configuration appear towards the top, and the down here, Advanced Network Configuration. We're gonna go with the standard network configuration at this point. So I'm going to click Next here.

5:13So for redundancies, your Config Sync and High Availability, we're not dealing with that right now. So just go ahead and click Next, 'cause we're just doing a basic setup at this point to get up and running. So Internal Network Configuration. This is our inside, our internal. So what is that gonna be? We need to bring up our topology here. So our internal is 10.10.101.11, and the floating is 10.10.101.13. So 11 and 13, 10.10.101. So let's go here for internal is 10.10.101.11.

5:46Netmask is just Class C, 255.255.255.0. Port Lockdown we're not gonna deal with, but our floating was 10.10.101.13, super. Now that Port Lockdown, if we look at it, you can say Allow None for nobody connect to it, or Allow 443 only. This is for management to access, connecting in. There we go. Internal VLAN Configuration. We've talked about VLANs. And we can put a VLAN ID if we want to. Now here is where we can set it to auto, which is just going to go ahead and automatically select a VLAN ID to use.

6:21And I'm gonna leave this at auto, because we're not using VLANs on our internal or external networks here. VLAN interface though, I need to select an interface. Now if we go back to our topology, we look at internal, we're using Interface 1.2, so let's change that. All right, we're gonna go Interface 1.2. The Tagging, we're gonna go Untagged, 'cause we're not tagging any VLANs, because we're not using VLANs in this lab. So if you were going to tag though, you could go ahead and do that, but we're not.

6:55So now I'm gonna hit Add. And that's basically, just gonna add that interface in here, that 1.2. So super. And now we're gonna click Next, because we have just configured our internal interface. So if I say Next, it's gonna go ahead and update that information. And now we're at our External Network Configuration. So under our IP address, we need to put that in. And what is that gonna be? Let's go take a look. On our external, that's up top here. 172.16.101.11. And 13 is our floating. So 11, and it's Interface 1.1.

7:27So 172.16.101. So let's go back over here. Let's go to 172.16.101.11. Our floating is, let's go and put our floating, 172.16.101.13, excellent. Our netmask is a default Class C. And our gateway, we're not gonna have one, because we're not providing internet access through our WAN interface. So this again, is only gonna be there so we can connect to it with our test box to try to access services on the internal side of our F5.

8:01So Port Lockdown, we're not gonna deal with that. VLAN name is external. Tag, we'll leave to auto. Interface was again 1.1. If I jump back real quick, that's because here on our topology, our interface is 1.1. Super. And Tagging is Untagged. We're not gonna tag, we're not using VLANs here. I'm gonna say Add. And Next, there we go. We configured our external interface. Now this is our High Availability Network Configuration. So we're just gonna do Select existing VLAN, and we're gonna go with internal, remember.

8:36When we first set up our virtual appliance, we had to assign the WAN switch to the external interface, the LAN to the internal, and for the high availability we selected internal. So there we go. Now we want to leave everything else as is, because this is the self IP address, 10.10.101.11, that's perfect. VLAN is internal and I gave it this VLAN ID of 4094. It's fine, just perfect. It already has the internal 1.2 interface applied to it.

9:06So we're gonna click Next. All right, time for NTP, your network time protocol configuration. So what you can do is come in here and add your own NTP servers if you want to, which you should do if you're in a production environment, because you want this device to use the same NTP servers as the rest of your devices. But since this is a lab, we're not gonna set those up, but you could just put in your IP addresses there, and then click the Add button and they'll show up in here. And then there you go. So Next. Now we come to DNS. So for your DNS servers, it does provide you with some defaults, which we're gonna leave as default.

9:42But in your environment, if this is a production environment, of course you're gonna wanna put your DNS servers in there, the same DNS servers the rest of your environment uses. You can also put in DNS search domain lists, for your local domain you'd wanna put in there. And any BIND forward servers, you'd wanna put those in there as well, super. But we're gonna leave this all as is, and say Next. Now this is our ConfigSync Configuration, and we're not gonna deal with this right now. So click Next. And this is the management failover unicast setup.

10:13And that is our failover, that's our IP address of our local host, 10.10.101.11. This is for our high availability, and it's already pulled that information in. So we're just gonna say Next. Now for our Mirroring Configuration, we don't deal with mirroring right now, so we're just going to say Next, 'cause we're not using it yet. All right, there we go. And we have just finished up there. So let's go ahead and click our Finished button down here. There we go. Super. And we are now finished with our base configuration. So let's go ahead and back this up.

10:45We're gonna do an archive. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on System, and we're going to find Archives, which is right here. So I clicked on Archives and it brought me into the Archive List. And this is basically your backups. So what we want to do is go to create, there we go. We're gonna give it a name. We're going to call this BigIP1-Base-Config, 'cause that's exactly what this is. It's our base configuration. You can enable encryption if you would like to and provide a passphrase, but since this is in lab, I'm not going to do that.

11:20But generally, you would definitely do this, okay? There we go. And your private keys, if you wanted to, you could include or exclude private keys. There we go. So all we're gonna do is put in the name at this point. So I'm gonna say Finished. And right now it's creating this archive for us. And again, an archive is just a backup of your configurations. And once it's finished saving, it's gonna give us a notification here in a moment. And there it goes. So it says, "Operation Status." It says, "Saving your active configuration," and it is saved.

11:53There we go. So we'll say, OK, super. And we can see we now have our BigIP1-Base-Config.ucs. And that UCS is user configuration set. And that user configuration set is an archive that contains all the files that you're gonna need to restore the current configuration to a new system. This is things like config files, licenses, accounts that were created, SSL certificates, like the whole shebang, it's in there. So now we're gonna download a copy of this. So we have an offline copy of our backup or our archive.

12:25So I'm gonna click on the archive name. There we go. It's gonna take us in here. And now I'm gonna go over here to the Download button. I'm gonna click on that, and there it goes. It has just downloaded that archive. So I now have a copy of my backups that I can store somewhere, securely, of course. So there you go. That is walking through the base config of our F5 BIG-IP device. Now in the next nugget, we're going to go ahead and set up our test host and verify connectivity.

0:01All right, here we are in our VMware environment and I've already got a Windows Test PC set up. So what you're gonna do is just set one up. So you can go to create register VM and you can either do it from an OVA here, or you could create a new one and use an ISO if you've got like a downloaded Linux or Windows ISO file that you want to use. But basically just spin you up something with a desktop environment. That's the key here. Once you do, you want to make sure, we're actually gonna go into this here.

0:35You wanna make sure you go into the actions and go into, let's see, where is it? There it is. Edit settings. You're gonna wanna make sure that you have a network adapter in the F5 WAN network, okay? That is very key because otherwise you won't be able to communicate with the WAN interface or the external interface of the BIG-IP. So I'm gonna show you what I did here. You should have multiple network adapters. That's just because I wanted to have some outside connectivity at some point. I'm not sure what this one was for, but this F5 WAN though, that's what I'm really concerned about here.

1:10So I'm gonna cancel that and I'm gonna show you something. I'm gonna go in here and this is my Windows desktop. And let's see, let's make it a little bigger. There we go. Let's go into networks, network status. That'll work. Let that fire up. I don't know why it makes the windows so small. There we go. Let's go into change adapter options. And you'll see here, that's my ethernet2 on the WAN, the F5 WAN network. So I'm gonna go down to properties and you're gonna see that I have 172 16 101.5, which is in the same subnet, class C there.

1:48255 255 255 0 subnet of my external BIG-IP machine because its IP address is 172 16 101.11. So there you go. I'm .5. So I should be able to ping from here, .11. So let's try that. Let's go here, let's go CMD. Bring up a terminal. Okay, there we go. I should be able to ping 172.16.101.11.

2:20And I'm not able to, okay, but I think I know what's wrong and I'll show you what's wrong here. This is weird. I've run into this with VMware where when deploying the F5 appliances that sometimes the interfaces don't quite match up. So let's stop that there and I'll show you what I mean by that. So here we go. When we went through and configured, I'll bring up an image here for you. Let me spin this up. And I'm gonna pull this in so you can see this. This is the video I recorded earlier.

2:51So here, when we first deployed this, we went through and we set the management to the VM network, which is fine, internal to F5 LAN, external to F5 WAN. And then our HA was F5 LAN, right? Just as we would expect. LAN to internal, WAN to external, right? Well, for some reason VMware gets things not quite right. So I'll show you what you need to do to fix this if this is happening to you. So let me close that. What you need to do, go to your BIG-IP, go to action, go down to edit settings, and here's what we need to do. See, for some reason, this LAN here should be WAN.

3:23So I need to switch that one to WAN. And this WAN needs to go to LAN. So you need to swap those two. Now if I click save, there we go. All right. And if I go back to my Windows PC, fire that up, and I hit the up arrow and you can see now I can ping my BIG-IP device. Yeah, so for some reason VMware tends to swap those, I don't know why, but it does. And that's how you fix it. So lemme close this stuff outta here. So now we have our Windows test box.

3:53We verified connectivity. I can ping my BIG-IP device. I'm gonna close that. Let's jump over to BIG-IP, make sure we can ping the Windows device. So I'm gonna do a ping, well, if I can click in there. There we go. Ping 172.16.101.5, which is the Windows host. There you go. So I have to weigh communications. All right, super. That solves that piece. So now we have our test host and we have communications between BIG-IP and the test host. So now we're going to, in the next nugget, set up our web servers and make sure those are functioning.

4:24So I will see you there shortly.

0:00Now it's time to deploy our web servers. You see I've got three of them already. I've got F5 server one, two, and three. But I'm gonna show you how I did this. Because I went over here, and I went to bitnami.com/stack/nginx/virtual-machine. Here's the URL there. Because I wanted to download an NGINX virtual machine image ready to go. So what you do is, you go to this page or you can use whatever you want. It doesn't matter, it's up to you. This is just an easy way to get it up and running quickly. Download your OVA format to your machine, okay?

0:33And it's an OVA, just like we downloaded from F5 for our BIG-IP Virtual Edition. So then I come over here and I'm gonna go to Create/Register VM and I'm gonna do it from an OVA, I'm gonna say Next, give it a name and maybe you'll wanna call this like Web1 or something. That's fine. Then you're gonna need to browse to your OVA file or drag and drop. So I'm going to drag and drop that in there. There we go. I'm gonna say Next, select my storage, Next, Agree to the EULA. Very simple, Next.

1:05Alright, here we go. Network Mapping, I want these to be on my F5 LAN there, so they're on the inside, the internal of my F5 device. They're on that same network. I can leave that at Thin, Power on automatically, that's up to you. I'm going to not select that. Go ahead and say Next. Alright, and here under Network Properties, you can go ahead and put your IP address in here. So actually what we could do is, go over to our topology, and we see here where we've got 10.10.101.101, 102 and 103.

1:43So we'll do 10.10.101.101 here. So I'll come back to here, and I'll say 10.10.101.101. There we go. Default gateway is gonna be 10.10.101.11, because that's the IP address of our F5 BIG-IP, Domain Name Servers, let's just do 8.8.8.8, Google domain name. It's gonna be F5lab.int. And DNS Search Path, don't worry about it. There we go. So now I'll say Next.

2:15There we go, super. That all looks good. Go ahead and Finish. And I'm gonna let that fire up. We see BIG-IP-1 there and it's doing it's, down here you can see it's go ahead and it's deploying that. So I'm gonna come back as soon as this is finished and we will wrap up, how to set up on these web servers. Alright, it has finished. So I'm gonna go over to my Web1. I'm gonna go in there. I'm gonna go ahead and fire it up. Let this thing boot up here. And once it does, we're gonna login and using the default credentials of bitnami, bitnami.

2:48So the username is bitnami, password is bitnami. And then we're gonna edit one of the files to allow us to use password authentication. So once this boots up, we'll go ahead and do that and I'll show you. It's pretty simple. Alright, we are back and it has booted up. So there we go, Enter, make sure we're click down here. So bitnami is the username, and the password as well. There we go. So I need to change the password, current password, bitnami, new password, there is one.

3:21There we go, excellent. Super duper. Now we need to change a file. So what we're gonna do, and we're changing this because by default this VM is set to do authentication with certificates, but we want use passwords, just make things a little easier. So what we're gonna do, we're going to type sudo or sudo, just depending on how you pronounce it, nano/etc/ssh/sshd_config, just like that.

3:54Enter, there we go. So now what we're gonna do, we're gonna modify the password authentication line. So how do we find that in this whole config file? Well you can use Control + W. So I'm gonna do that Control + W, it's a search, and I'm gonna type in PasswordAuthentication, capital P, capital A, hit Enter, and it's gonna take me to it. Which we can see if, I'm moving the cursor across the screen, can't really highlight it, but it's right here. And it said PasswordAuthentication set to no.

4:24So I'm gonna change this to yes, just like that, excellent. And what I'm gonna do now is, I need to save these changes. So I'm gonna hit Control + X. There's a little menu down here at the bottom of the screen. Here's the cursor, if you look down here, there's all these different letters. X is for exit. So I'm gonna hit Control. Let me make sure I'm clicked in there Control + X. There you go. Save these changes, Yes. And I want to use the same name. So just hit Enter.

4:55There we go, we have made that change. Now I need to restart the SSH server. So I'm gonna do sudo, I'm say /etc/init.d/ssh Space force-reload. There it goes. Now I'm gonna hit the Up Arrow to bring that command up again. And ssh instead of force-reload, I just remove that. I'm gonna put to restart, and there we go. So now we can use our password to SSH into these devices to manage them.

5:29Now let's make sure that we can communicate with the internal interface of our BIG-IP. So we should be able to do ping. Let's see, what is our IP address on this? Is it the 10.10? Let's do it real quick. Let's check this, ifconfig | more. And it doesn't like that. So let's do ipaddress. Let's try that and | more. Nope, doesn't like that either. That's pretty interesting. So let's do this then, ipconfig maybe. No, whatever it is.

6:00That's really interesting, it doesn't, maybe I have to do a sudo, sudo ifconfig. There we go. Okay, that's what it was. Alright, super. Now we got that figured out. It was simply, I need to escalate my privileges within Linux. I'm just a standard user right now, but if I run a command sudo, that runs it as root. Alright, super. So we can see the IP address is 10.1.101.101. Alright, there we go. So now let's try pinging 10.1.101.11 which is the internal interface of the BIG-IP. And survey says host unreachable.

6:33Okay, not a problem. Let's figure out why. So let's go ahead and stop that. And you know what? I don't know that I set this to use that network. So let me check that. Let's go to Actions. Let's go to Edit Settings and it is set to F5 LAN. That's interesting. All right, so I am on this correct network. Let me ahead and Cancel that. Okay, I see what I did, and hopefully you cut it too because what is my IP address, 10.1.101.101, right? Yes, what am I trying to ping? 10.1.101.101, all right?

7:07But if we go back to our topology, you'll see I kind of messed up. It's supposed to be 10.10.101, but I had put 10.1.101. So that is obviously the problem. I'm not gonna be able to pinging it because I have the wrong IP address on my server. So don't do that. So I'm gonna go ahead and close this out. I'm gonna go ahead and power it off. Say yes, I'm gonna go to one of the servers that I have that I had created earlier. Let's see, go back to virtual machines. So now I'm gonna go over here and click on my F5 server one.

7:39There we go, we're gonna open this up. Do a quick ifconf, click one more time, ifconfig. We see my IP address is 10.10.101.101. So I'm gonna make sure I can ping 10.10.101.11. It's our internal interface IP address of our BIG-IP. And there we go, we can ping. So just be sure to put the right IP addresses on your servers or they're not gonna work. (Instructor chuckles) Lesson learned, right? We all knew that anyway. Okay, super. That wraps this part up. Next we're actually gonna jump back in the IP device.

8:12We're gonna create a pool, add some pool members. We're gonna talk about what that is, and then we're gonna do some final testing of our labs. So I'll see you there shortly.

0:00All right, now it's time to bring this whole thing together. And before we jump into the BIG-IP and do our configuration, final testing, we're gonna talk about a couple of things. Pools, members, and virtual servers. So we've got our BIG-IP here. We're gonna, boom, BIG-IP. There we go. So we've got our test host out here. We're just gonna call this our Windows host. We've got three web servers on this side over here. There we go. We're just gonna W for web, super. There we go. Now, what we have to do is create three things on the BIG-IP so that we can then come in here and use the load balancing services to load balance to our various hosts, okay?

0:44So let me remove those. What we're going to do is create three things. We're gonna create a pool. So a pool is a group of members, and this here is a member. And the way we identify a member within the BIG-IP is we give an IP address. So like 10.10.101.101. And then we put a colon and a port number. And this port number would be like 80, and that's for HTTP, or could be 443 for HTTPS.

1:17We just need a port number in there. So this is a member and we're gonna have three of them. We're gonna have one for our 101 server, one for our 102 server, and one for our 103 server. And we're gonna use port 80 on all of them. So we're gonna have these three members and these three members are inside of a pool, okay? and these three members are inside of a pool, okay? And now that we have a pool, we create something called a virtual server that is running inside of our BIG-IP. And basically, what this is, it's a big ear, right?

1:49It listens for inbound connections. And I configure this virtual server to then load balance or analyze traffic, do something to traffic, and then forward it onto a pool that consists of various members. So this is how this all ties together. So now, we're gonna jump into the BIG-IP. We're gonna go ahead and configure a pool with some members. We're gonna create a virtual server and tie it to the pool. Then from our Windows test box, we're gonna test it out to make sure it all works.

2:20All right, here we are in our BIG-IP and what we're gonna do is we're gonna go down to local traffic, that's our LTM, our local traffic manager. And we're then going to go down to Virtual Servers. I'm gonna go ahead and click on Virtual Server List. It's gonna come in here. Guess what? We don't have any virtual servers. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna come over to our Create button on the right. We're gonna click Create and it's gonna bring up a page so that we can create a virtual server. Now, before we create the virtual server, we need to have a pool of members in it.

2:52So then why did I come into the virtual servers page? Well, I'll show you why. If we scroll right on down here to the bottom, we're looking for our pools. Let's see, Policies, Default Pool, here we go. So here's our Default Pool for this virtual server. And I have no pools, but there's a plus button. Let's click on that plus button, there we go. And here is where we can create a new pool. So let's give it a name. Now, I'm gonna call this pool HTTP_APP1_Pool, okay? Now, I'm gonna call this pool HTTP_APP1_Pool, okay? And that's because I'm trying to give some description.

3:23This is gonna be for my APP1, okay? We're just running a webpage. It says default nginx webpage, but I'm gonna reference it APP1, and I'm using the HTTP protocol, and of course, it's a pool. So that way, if I ever see this name, I know it's a pool and I don't need a description because I gave it a descriptive name. Health Monitors, we're not gonna do that right now. Now, when it comes to Load Balancing Methods, we're gonna leave this at Round Robin, but we have a lot of options in here and we'll get to those later on. And then down here in the New Members section, what we're gonna do is, this is a new node.

3:55So what I'm gonna give it is a node address here and I'm gonna give it 10.10.101.101 and a service port. Remember, I had to add a port here. So we're gonna say 80, there we go. And it automatically filled in HTTP for me. I'm gonna say Add. And what's nice is you'll see that it actually leaves that information. So now, I can just hit that and backspace, put a two, say Add, backspace, three, say Add.

4:26And now, I have all three of my members in the pool. So now, I can go ahead and click Finished and it's gonna take me back to my Virtual Servers page. Now, if I scroll to the bottom, I now have my HTTP_APP1_Pool down here under my Default Pool. So let's go ahead and create this virtual server. We got a few things to put in here. All right, so let's go ahead and fill out these properties here. I need a name. So I'm gonna call VS for virtual server, -172.16.101.11.

4:56That's the IP on the external interface of my BIG-IP that's listening and gonna answer for this service or this virtual server, say -HTTP for the protocol I'm using and APP1 because that's the application's gonna be tied to on the inside. Just give me a reference. Then you can put a description in, if you'd like. If we go to type, there's a whole bunch of options, but we're gonna stick with standard there. And I'm gonna do a destination address. And here, I'm gonna put in the address that's listening on the external interface, which is the same IP I have up there in the name.

5:28It's gonna be 172.16.101.11. There we go. And port, I'm gonna put 80, there we go. It's gonna fill in HTTP for me. State is enabled, that's perfect. I'm gonna scroll on down to the bottom and go and click Finished. And now, it's gonna go ahead and I have my virtual server up and running. All right, and now, I need to jump over to our test box. I'm gonna do that, jump over to my ESXi, go to my Lab-Admin-PC, connect in there.

5:59There we go, super. And put in my password. Let's make this quite a bit bigger. All right, let's open up Google Chrome. And I should be able to go to 172.16.101.11. And I should be able to go to 172.16.101.11. Hit Enter, and there we go. Congratulations, you're now running NGINX. So this is one of my web servers on the backend. So this shows me that I can use my lab Windows PC and use the load balancing through the BIG-IP connecting to one of the web servers.

6:34All right, super cool. So now, we have a lab up and running and working. Good job, everybody.

0:00Alright, for our validation, you need to go ahead and create a new virtual server, if you would. And that means you're also gonna need to create a new pool. Now, earlier we set one up for HTTP, going to our app one that went to our three web servers. We're gonna do the exact same thing except instead of HTTP, we're gonna use HTTPS, which is port 443. Now we're still gonna have it connect to, or basically have a virtual server run on 172 16 101 dot 11, just as we did before.

0:31But this time again, we're using HTTPS or port 443 and you're gonna set up your pool with the three members in it of our three web servers. So good luck and let's see how you do. I'm gonna go ahead and show you the resolution or how to do this just in case you wanna take a look. So here we go. Let's jump over to our big IP. We're gonna go to our local traffic here and we're gonna go to virtual servers. Go to our server list. We have our one virtual server there. So what we're gonna do, I'm just gonna copy that name.

1:03because we're just changing this to HTTPS. So let's go ahead and go over to create on the right here. Go to create, and I'm first gonna need to create a pool. So let's scroll to the bottom. Let's create us a new pool. And that's because, again, we're using a different protocol here. So go to new pool, click the plus sign and the pool I'm gonna call HTTPS underscore app one underscore pool. There we go. And that's our HTTPS traffic to our app one. All right, then I'm come down here and we're gonna leave this at round robin load balancing.

1:38I'm gonna come down here to my new member section. Go to my address and put in my 10 dot 10 dot 101 dot 101. And here we're gonna put 443, there we go. And of course it auto-filled the HTTPS for us. I'm gonna add that. I'm simply going to hit the backspace and change that 101 right here to 102. There we go, hit add, backspace and change that to 103. Hit add, there you go. Go ahead and click finished. Gonna take us back to our virtual server page and if I scroll to the bottom, you'll see our HTTPS app one pool.

2:12So go back to the top. I'm gonna go ahead and paste in what I'd copied earlier. Remember I copied that, a virtual server name. There we go, get rid of that. I'm gonna change this HTTP to HTTPS in the name. Alright, perfect. We're gonna go down here to our destination address, and this is gonna be our external address. 172 dot 16 dot 101 dot 11, port is gonna be 443. It's gonna do HTTPS, there we go. State is enabled. That's exactly what we want. And we're finished here. Let's scroll to the bottom and create this thing already.

2:45Go ahead and do finished. Super, we'll let that finish up. And there you go, we have it. So let's go test. I'm gonna jump over to my ESX host here. This is my lab admin pc, my Windows box. I'm gonna put HTTPS this time, colon slash slash 172 dot 16 dot 101 dot 11 and hit enter. And the first time we run through this, it does take it a few seconds for it to connect, which is fine. It's a live environment. All right, and there it goes.

3:15It's showing up now. Now, I will say it took about 20 seconds and I had to refresh it once so that it would go through. It's just because when we first set up a virtual server, it's starting up the services and all that on our big IP. So it does take a little bit the first time, but there you go. And we see that it is HTTPS up here at the top. And so that is working properly. And if we take out the HTTPS and just make it HTTP, that should work fine as well. Hit enter and sure enough, absolutely. So there you go. That's how we set up a new virtual server with a new pool and the pool members.

3:48I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.