Confirming Functionality and Upgrading a Big-IP

0:01One of the ways that we can confirm functionality of our BIG-IP device is by going into it and looking at some statistics. So that's what we're gonna do. Here we are in our BIG-IP and I'm gonna go up here on the main menu over here to Statistics and I'm gonna go down to Module Statistics and Local Traffic. I'm gonna click on that. It'll bring up our local traffic. Here we have a Status Summary, is what it defaults to on our Statistics Type here. And we see we have two Virtual Servers, two Pools, three Nodes, and they're all available over here on the right.

0:35But of course, it'll show you Unavailable, Offline and Unknown as well. But that's just saying whether they're active or not. But what about verifying the functionality, making sure that traffic is flowing, like we want it to flow? Well, at that point, we can actually click into these things here. So if I click on Virtual Servers, it's gonna take me in to seeing the virtual servers. Okay. But another way to do that is if I go back to my Statistics, modules, Local Traffic, let it go back to this page here, I can come up here to the Statistics Type dropdown and go to Virtual Servers; It'll take me to the same place, you'll see here.

1:09And this is where I can look at the individual virtual servers. Here I have my HTTP and my HTTPS. And I can see the Bits and Packets going in and out. And we can also see the number of Connections and Requests. So you can see this at the virtual server level. But, that's not always enough, right? Absolutely not, what about the Pools? Well, I can go up here and I can go down to my pools and this way it's gonna load up our individual pools that are attached to those virtual servers. And now we can see the same information with our pools.

1:42But, what about individual pool members? Well, we can expand these and then see the individual members and then take a look at our information about how our transactions, our sessions are being routed, so we can see how they're being balanced between individual members of pools; We can make sure traffic is flowing like we want it to. And something else we can check, we can come back over here on the left to Module Statistics and go down to, instead of Local Traffic, we can go to Network. And this is gonna load up our Interfaces and show us information about those interfaces.

2:16The status being UP or UNINITIALIZED; UNINITIALIZED, 'cause we're not using it. Your Bits and Packets, the amount of data flowing. You got Multicast, any errors that might be in there. And the Drops, like if you take a look here, at our management interface, have 31,000 drops. There's probably something wrong there. I should probably take a look at that. (laughs) And we saw some of the same information in the ifconfig command in our Linux terminal, a few skills back. But, this is another way to view it, with in the web UI here, which is pretty darn handy.

2:47But, guess what? We can look at this stuff in the TMOS as well. So, let's go ahead and bring up a terminal here. This is an SSH connection. And if you look at this, what does that mean? Hmm, think about it now. We've seen this before. Are we in the TMOS? Well, no, we're not in the TMOS because we don't see TMOS in here. What we're connected to is just the Linux OS, okay? So, in order to go into the TMOS, tmsh, for traffic management shell; Now we're in the TMOS.

3:17Right there. It's gonna tell us that. So once we're in the TMOS, we've got some commands we can run. Now, I want you to start with show and hit a question mark. And these are gonna be show commands, okay? I don't know what I hit there, but, I hit something that I didn't intend to. So, let's do this again. Let's try the show ? There we go. Okay. (laughs) So, what I wanna show you is Modules. Really, we have various modules here and we know that the BIG-IP is a modular system.

3:49We can enable various modules for different features. Well, when it comes to the TMOS, and working in the terminal here, the commands are sorted by their various modules. So if we want to see, let's say statistics of a virtual server, then we need to know that they reside under the Local Traffic Manager 'cause that's where we deal with them. If I go over here to my web UI and I go under Local Traffic, that's where my virtual servers reside. And again, the same thing, in the TMOS, they reside under ltm.

4:21So, what I'm gonna see is show ltm. Now, it's going to show me the, if I hit a question mark there, all the components that reside under ltm. One of which is virtual, down here. So it's gonna show me my Virtual server configuration. I also see my pool there, where we looked at the pool information. So it's just to, kinda get you to understand that there are modules within the TMOS and various commands are nested in those individual modules.

4:52So, if I do show ltm virtual and hit enter, it's gonna show me all my virtual servers. So here's the HTTP virtual server. It's gonna show me some availability information here. Destination, Traffic, again, we're able to see traffic coming in and out and going various locations. We also have SYN Cookies for SYN communications. And if I go down some more, I see my HTTPS virtual server. And again, same information there.

5:23Super. But what if I wanted to dig directly into one of those virtual servers? Well, I need to grab that virtual server name. So let's just grab this in here; Our HTTPS. I'm gonna go ahead and copy that. Hit enter and I'm gonna Q to exit outta there. There we go. What I'm gonna do is hit the up arrow, show ltm virtual, and then I'ma put a space and paste that name in there. And this is going to put me directly into only showing me the information about that one virtual server.

5:55So as we can see, it looks like the same information here. And there's a little more down here. We've got a Message Routing Framework, we've got some CPU Usage Ratios. Wonderful stuff. So that's how we can look at our virtual servers. But, what about the pools? Okay, well, we would want to, again, show ltm, local traffic manager, and then hit pool in here. Let's try that. Okay. I think it's actually just pool. There we go, just pool. Alright, super. So, what do we have here? Our HTTPS pool.

6:26And it's gonna go down here and again, show us a lot of different statistics and information. If I scroll down, there's our HTTP pool. So, I'm actually gonna go ahead and copy that one. There we go. And I can hit Q to exit outta there. And as you can imagine, if hit the up arrow command and I didn't paste the name in there, it's gonna only show me that one pool's worth of information. And that's the same way it worked when we look at our virtual servers. But, what if I wanna look at the individual members of a specific pool?

6:57Well then, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna hit the up arrow to bring up that last command, show ltm pool and my pool name. I'm gonna put the key word here, members; Just like that. And hit enter. And now it's gonna show me the individual members. So as I start to scroll down, this is my actual pool, as we scroll down here, there we go. And, here's my first pool member. That's my 101, right there. It's gonna show me statistics about that. And as I scroll down, here's my 102.

7:29And I scroll down some more; There's my 103. And those are all the members of the pool. So this is how we can access, I'm gonna hit Q here to exit outta that. There we go. This is how we can access those same statistics we saw in the web UI via the TMOS. Now, we also within the web UI, if I jump back here real quick, show you a quick refresher. We looked at under Statistics, our modules, we went to network, there we go, and that brought up our Interfaces. We can see that same information, I bring our TMOS back up, via the command show /net interface.

8:06There we go. And we're gonna see here the same information. Our Status, our Bits, In and Out, our packets, In and Out, our Drops and our Errors, all the way. And you see here, there's my 31,000 errors on the inbound of my management interface. And ah, here we go. Looks like this one is actually connected, I didn't see that earlier, to a hundred meg connection when I know for a fact it's connected to a gigabit connection. So, there's something going on there, probably a duplex mismatch or something like that.

8:36Something weird going on. And definitely, I'd wanna dig into that. All right, super, so that's how to see that. Now let's hit the quit command. Let's use that because we're gonna exit out of the TMOS. Alright, now we're back to just Linux. So here, what I want to do is go ahead and run the command, bigtop; Think about like the circus and here's why. If I hit bigtop, there we go. This is our bigip f5lab; That's our BIG-IP that we're on. This is our virtual server, our HTTP and our HTTPS.

9:10And down here, are our members, right, of our pools. And that's those six members. And, what we can do is sit here, sit back and watch the statistics of our connections in real time. And that's why the bigtop is the command. Think about it like you go to the circus. You sit back and relax, you watch the trapeze artist, you watch the clowns, and here we're watching the statistics. That's right! So you can sit here and watch statistics. I don't have any traffic flowing right now, but, we sure could generate some.

9:44So let me do that real quick. Alright, here I am, on my Windows test box. I'm gonna open a browser. And once that comes up, I'm gonna open incognito window. There we go. And go ahead and hit my 172.16, there we go, to generate a little traffic. Now I'm gonna jump back to my terminal here. And there we go. I see my one connection now that's connecting to, actually not that one, It moved up here. There it is. And there we go. Went to the top. And that's my server three.

10:14And if I jump back real quick, you see that server three that I hit there. So then, back again, if we go to our terminal, we'll see, that yes, that is server three, that's our 103. And so we can actually see the live traffic going in and out and see which pools and which pool members are being accessed. And again, this is within our Linux portion, not the TMOS. And we use the command bigtop. b i g t o p. And again, think of it like the circus. You're getting to watch all this entertainment. (laughs) Pretty exciting. Alright, super. And then one more thing we're gonna look at.

10:44I'm gonna hit the Q to stop that. bigtop is our good old friend ifconfig. And again, this is to look at individual ethernet interfaces and verify things like IP addresses. So see external, there we go. We can also look at our errors and overruns and the amount of traffic coming in and out. Just a quick refresher on that. We've looked at if config before, but, the new ones we've seen include our bigtop and looking at our virtual servers and pools and pool members via the terminal, as well as of course, our F5 web UI and the statistics.

11:21And this is how we can look within both the web UI and the terminals to look at statistics and identify if traffic is flowing as it should be, or looking for errors and functionality within the BIG-IP.

0:00Let's talk about platform and software lifecycles, especially when it comes to upgrading your platforms. And that's because we need to talk about both hardware and software. Now, if you think about it, when it comes to hardware, so let's say we've got our hardware appliance here inside, we've got... Well, we've got CPUs. That's right, we've got memory, absolutely. What else do we have? Well, we've got storage. You gotta have somewhere to store whatever software we put on there. And the thing is, when this hardware is designed for specific software, it's designed to run that software.

0:35Now, the thing is, though, software, what does it do over time? Well, it changes. But our hardware is static. Right, our hardware does not change. So as software changes, maybe new features come about, they require more resources and they can overcome hardware at a specific point. So the idea is this takes place, this whole process takes place over time. And many vendors will only support given hardware for a specific period of time, maybe five years or seven years, whatever it might be.

1:14And that's because not only will the software outgrow the hardware possibly, well, that hardware gets old. And what happens to old equipment? Well, it breaks. That's right. Just like vehicles. When you have a vehicle, well, the warranties for vehicles are only gonna last so long. You're not gonna be able to warranty a vehicle for 20 years because it's not gonna last that long, most likely. And there's gonna be lots of parts that break and will have to be replaced. Well, the same thing with the hardware platform. So keep that in mind as we talk about upgrading hardware and software because both of them will have to be upgraded over time when we're talking about platforms.

1:52And just for example, if you think about Microsoft, well, Microsoft, they have their desktops and server operating systems, and they all have various versions. And those change over time and they're only supported for so long and they're no longer supported. And that's because as a vendor, you can't support a specific piece of software forever, right? Things change. You're gonna have to drop off the older versions to support newer versions. So let's talk about the platform lifecycle when it comes to the F5 environment.

2:24Well, it starts off with general availability. When a new platform is designed and put out there or it could be just a software version, it's put out to the public to be used for a specific period of time, at which point it's no longer for sale, okay? And this may be, who knows, it could be five years down the line. And so that specific product is only sold for five years. Well, then, that new product is no longer being sold, but it's still being kept up, meaning you're gonna have updates that happen along the way.

2:59And at some point, end of new software support is going to end, right? So there's no more software support agreements that are going to be issued. And then as we continue on, we're gonna continue with additional updates and upgrades until end of software development. And at that point, there will be no more software development done on that version of the platform. And in the F5 world, generally, there is three years between the time of end of sale and end of software development.

3:33So it's pretty much standard for three years thereabouts. And at that point, we enter a different color in the bar graph you see here. And that's because this is known as extended support because it's extended beyond the end of software development. And then finally, we have the end of technical support, which really means, "After this point in time, you're no longer going to get any kind of support for this specific version of the platform." So what do you need to do during some point during this timeline?

4:04Well, at some point you're going to need to decide to upgrade to a newer version because this older version is being sunsetted or end-of-lifed. So you're gonna have to upgrade at some point to get onto a new version of the platform so that you can stay in this supported area here. So that's the platform lifecycle. Now, let's move on and talk about software versioning within the BIG-IP. So here, we're starting off with the name BIG-IP, which we'll see when we go to download software the name of the OS here we're dealing with or the software package.

4:38But when it comes to the numbers, let's talk about what those mean. Now, when it comes to the numbers, our major release is gonna be that first number and our minor release is the second number. And then we come into a maintenance release, that is our third number. And then finally a point release. And that is the two there, the end number. So that's our major, minor, maintenance, and point releases. So when we go in and start looking at these version numbers, we're going to be able to understand what those are.

5:10Now, let's move on and talk about hardware replacement. And we've talked about the hardware replacement as the fact that yeah, it's gotta be upgraded because as it gets older, it's only gonna last for so long. And as new features come out, they can push the ability of these devices. So again, we've got to upgrade them. And as they get older, the vendors are only gonna support them for so long. So that's why it's important to understand how long your device is gonna last for.

5:42And usually, that's referred to as a lifecycle. And when you're going to go and use a new product, oftentimes it's very important to understand the lifecycle of that device so that you know how long it's gonna last for so that you can set expectations to replace those physical devices as time goes on. Maybe you're gonna replace them every five years or so. All right, that covers our discussion over the hardware and software upgrades and why we're going to do them, why we need to understand the lifecycle and the platform lifecycle.

6:16And in the next Nugget, we're gonna take a look at device upgrade eligibility. So I'll see you there shortly.

0:00Alright, it's time to look at determining device upgrade eligibility. So can you upgrade your BIG-IP? Well, let's find out. So in order to do this, we first need to figure out what BIG-IP device we have, okay? And what software version we're running. So let's jump into our BIG-IP. Should be right here, here we go. And let's see. In order to find this out, I'm gonna go down to system and I'm gonna go to software management and click on that. Super.

0:30My product is the BIG-IP. I know I'm running the virtual edition. My version is 17.1.0.2, build 0.0.2. It's also important to go ahead and take a look at where this is running and we're gonna talk about this later when we go through the actual upgrade process, your boot disc and boot location. But for right now, let's focus on our version. And of course, if you're running a hardware device, you need to figure out what version of hardware you're running. So there we go. So we're running our VE or virtual edition in our lab, but really we're looking at the 17.1.0.2 build 0.0.2, very important.

1:04So next up we're gonna go over to not there, but let's try this one. There we go. Alright, this is the choose a BIG-IP update or upgrade version. So really this is our upgrade guide. Now if you go through this guide, it's gonna help you figure out how to do your upgrades, but we're gonna go ahead and do that anyway together. So what they're starting you off with is talking about an upgrade versus an update. And if we go down here, it's pretty simple, but you can go and look at this.

1:34So an upgrade, we're talking about various versions, whereas an update could just be a simple patch or something like that, okay? So really what we're looking to start with here is getting your platform information. So if you've got a hardware platform or virtual edition platform and getting your software version as well, which we've already done, then you're going to determine the software versions that your platform supports, okay? So for your hardware platforms, you're gonna go down here and follow this link.

2:05And it's gonna bring this up right here. This is our, if I scroll back to the top here, hardware, software compatibility matrix. So you're gonna scroll down here if you have a hardware device that is, and find your hardware device. And there are several different types of course, and you're gonna figure out, well, what compatible software versions can run on my device. That's gonna let you know if you can update to a newer version or not. Now if you can, it's gonna say, hey, so maybe you're running an i850. Well then you can run everything up to the latest.

2:35So you're pretty darn good there. But if you scroll down here and you're running an older 800, you're stuck with the 14. So obviously if you wanna go newer, you're gonna have to upgrade your hardware, alright? And if I go back then to my upgrade guide, here's our BIG-IP VE platforms. Well you can go to your compatibility matrix. I'm gonna click on this one over here. There we go. This is our BIG-IP virtual edition supported platforms. Super.

3:06And if I scroll down here, you're gonna need to find your hypervisor 'cause that's really what it relies on. I'm running VMware 7.0 U3 right here. So looks like I can run 17.1.X so 17.1 anything. So I can run the latest version, which is what I'm running. But if I was running an older version of ESXi, maybe 7.0, I would be limited. And as you can see there, so I know if I'm running 7.0 U3c and later I can go ahead and run the latest, which is what I'm running.

3:38So there we go. Super. So there's not just VMware though. If I scroll down here, we're gonna see Linux, KVM, the Xen Project, OpenStack. I'm gonna go down, I'm gonna see Hyper-V down here. I'm gonna see Citrix hypervisor, Nutanix, you're gonna see your cloud platforms. So you're talking AWS there. It's our Amazon. If I scroll down and see My Azure, keep going, you're gonna see GCP, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and the list goes on and on and on. There's OCI, IBM.

4:09You just need to figure out what you're running on and coming here and check to see what versions you can run. I'm gonna scroll back up here to the top within your virtual environment on your virtual edition. Super. Once you've seen that, 'cause there are hardware and our virtual environments limit what we can upgrade to. Now once we figure out what we can upgrade to, we want to go over to I'm gonna click here. This is the knowledge base article 13845 talking about upgrade paths.

4:42And this is important because depending on what version you're on and upgrading to, there are some things you need to know about. So if I scroll down here, let's say we're on BIG-IP 17.0, which we're actually going to upgrade from. I set up another BIG-IP running 17.0.0, we're gonna upgrade to the latest version. And so what you're gonna see here is let me go back up a little bit. Versions you're upgrading to and versions you can directly upgrade from. Ah, okay, so I could upgrade directly from 15.1x to 17.1x or 17.0 if I wanted to.

5:15That means this is supported. However, additional information over here, you wanna read these notes because they're gonna save you some headaches. So again, if this is your upgrade paths, this is very important. Can you go from 12 directly to 17? Well no, but you can go from 12 if you were down here to 14 and then from 14 to 16 and then you can go 16 to 17. So yeah, if you had something that old, a version of software that old, you're gonna have to jump through some hoops, go through a few iterations of upgrades.

5:51So this is your upgrade pass. Now once you find out, okay cool, I'm good to upgrade to the latest 17.1x, alright, got that. 'Cause I checked my, let me jump back here, my hypervisor and it supports me going to 17.1x Super. So I'm good there or my hardware supports me. If I go back to my hardware, my hardware supports me going up to 17.1x, I'm good there. Then I check my upgrade paths and from 17.0 to 17.1x, no problems.

6:21I read through this and it doesn't look like anything's really gonna mess with me in here. So I'm good there. Now it's time to actually download my software, okay? And we're going through this process because this is very important. You don't wanna just willy-nilly go pick something to upgrade to or you might end up in a world of hurt. So if we go over here, I log into MyF5 there, I'm gonna go over here to resources, go down to downloads. This should look familiar. We did this when setting up our labs. I have read and agree of course, there we go. Product family. I'm running the BIG-IP, boom, product line, I'm running down here.

6:55I'm gonna select that. It's my BIG-IP 17 virtual edition right there and a product version. Now here's the thing, this is what you want to select, which version you're looking to download. So I'm gonna look to download 17.1.0. There we go. And as I scroll down here, I am needing to think about what I wanna download for an update. Now here's the thing. On a virtual edition, you don't wanna download virtual edition like here, which is what we did when we set up our lab.

7:27If you're doing an update, it's different. If you download a virtual edition here, this is gonna download your OVA files, your virtual disc files. We don't want that. What we want is an ISO because we're gonna upload an ISO to our BIG-IP so that it can do the update from the ISO file, alright? So what I wanna do is select right here, 17.1.0.2, that's the latest version. Then I would go ahead and scroll down here and it's gonna show me my download files. And what I want is this right here, this ISO.

7:57BIG-IP, I'm gonna select it. 17.1.0.2-0.0.2, iso use for upgrades. This is what we're looking for. Alright, super. The other thing we wanna download is if we scroll down here, and it's a little tricky, you gotta dig through these is the MD5 file for this ISO file here. Now the MD5 is a hash of this file. So you download the two and you're able to compare them to make sure that when you downloaded this, nothing was corrupted or changed or anything so that you have a clean file you can upgrade from.

8:28So what I wanna do is go down and find this. And there it is right here. This is what I wanna download as well. This is the BIG-IP 17.1.0.2-0.0.2.iso.md5. This is the MD5 file for use for upgrades, does not include the EUD. So that's exactly what I'm gonna download as well. And I've already done that. So once you download those two, we're gonna need to verify the hash and checksum, okay, so I'm gonna bring in a terminal and I've downloaded these. I'm gonna hit the ls command. I'm just on my Mac here and this is the ISO file.

9:01This is my MD5 file. So what I wanna do is on a Mac. Now Windows is gonna be different and I'll show you on the Windows the command to use. So I'm gonna do is md5 and then put BIG and hit Tab. And there we go. It's gonna tab that out for me so I can hit Enter. It's gonna go ahead and generate MD5 hash for me, which should be the same hash that's in this file here. My MD5 file. Here's the hash. Alright, easy enough. Now all I need to do is read. So I'm gonna use the cat command to read what's in the BIG-IP file.

9:32.md5, not g5. There we go, there we go. So this is what's in the file. So as long as this matches this, we're good to go. And as I can look, I can see that yes it does match. So that means I downloaded a clean file and I can now use this file to upgrade. This is very important. You don't want to skip this step because if any form, way, form or fashion that that file was corrupted just a little bit, you could end up in a world of hurt. But we're gonna show you how to do the upgrade in a way that you can actually fall back to a previous version, which is always good in case there was some problems.

10:10But this is a big thing to do. You need to verify your MD5 checksume. So if you're on a Windows box, open up a command line and run the command cerutil -hashfile then give it your file name. So I would do my BIGIP... .iso and then put MD5 at the end. And that is actually going to run and generate the hash like we have right here. Then you're just gonna open this MD5 file with like a text editor or something and read the contents, which you're gonna see are this right here.

10:48And you're gonna compare your hashes at that point. So this is off, you're on a Windows box. Okay, super duper. Alright, there we go. That's how to go and figure out what you need to download and your device upgrade eligibility and of course using your hashes to verify the checksums of your download. In the next nugget we're gonna talk about a couple of steps that you can use to minimize your upgrade downtime. See you there shortly.

0:00All right, let's talk about some steps that we can use to minimize downtime during an upgrade. Well, the first one is to open a proactive service request. That's right, so if you're gonna do an upgrade, well, it's a good idea to go ahead and do this. So you're gonna go online and you're gonna open up a new service request for your upgrade. And this way, you can go ahead and get in line for some assistance and your information's already in the service ticket and you're ready to go because it's going to give you faster access to engineers for support.

0:40And that's pretty important because if you are experiencing an outage, you're gonna want access to these engineers pretty darn quickly. So go ahead and open a proactive service request. You don't have to wait until you have a problem to open a ticket. And if you would like additional help with your upgrade, you can contact F5's professional services and they can help you plan out your upgrade. However, this does come at an additional cost. But if you don't deal with the F5 a whole lot, it's kind of a set it and forget it kinda thing and you just do very little administration of it and you really want some help with it, then definitely contact them and make sure it's within your budget and you can get some assistance there so you don't experience some unwanted outages.

1:27So next up, in order to minimize our downtime during the upgrade, we need to document what software version we're running and the disk information. And when we go in, we're gonna take a look at this information. We're gonna go in there and find out what version of software we're running and the disk information, and that's the disk it is running on, as well as the boot partition, which is gonna be a number. So it'll be like HD1 is our disk and then .1 is our boot partition.

2:01And it's very important that we know this information ahead of time because we're gonna need to use it during the upgrade process. So go ahead and document that. And then lastly, what we're gonna do, we're gonna schedule a maintenance window. We're gonna schedule some downtime so that all of our users out there know that we're going to be down for an hour or two or however long during this upgrade, whatever you feel is necessary. And that way you buy yourself some time to troubleshoot issues if they do arise so you don't have to back out of the upgrade or update that you're doing and you can continue through and finish it out.

2:38But it's very important to schedule a maintenance window because it does take a little while for this to take place. Now when we do our upgrade a little later, it takes roughly 15, 20 minutes or so for the entire upgrade process to happen and does require a reboot. So keep that in mind as well. So when it comes to the amount of downtime you're going to experience, it's really going to be determined by what version you're coming from and going to. But in our instance, you'll see it's gonna take 15, 20 minutes or so if you follow along and do it in your lab.

3:12All right, so those are some steps that we can use to minimize our downtime during an upgrade. In the next nugget, we're gonna start preparing for our upgrade. So I'll see you there shortly.

0:00All right, it's time to prepare for our Big-IP Upgrade. We've gone ahead and downloaded our ISO file. We did our MD5 hash check, and now we're going to perform an upgrade. Well, not just yet anyway. We're gonna prepare for the upgrade, then we're gonna perform the upgrade. So here we're preparing. If you take a look at my IP address here, 192.168.121.12, you'll notice it's different than our Big-IP. Our Big-IP we've been working on is 192.168.121.11. That's right, I set up a second Big-IP and I did that because I needed to install a version of software that was earlier, so I could perform an upgrade.

0:36So what I did is install this version 17.0.0 Build 0.0.22. Okay, good, now we got that straightened out. Let's go through our pre-upgrade checks. Now the first thing we're gonna do is create a backup, right? Absolutely. So in the Big-IP world, this is called an Archive. So in order to create an Archive, what we're going to do is, we're going to go to System, which is right here, the bottom left, and then go down to Archives.

1:07There we go. And I have none in here. This is a new install, that's why. So what I'm gonna do is click on the Create button on the far right and Create, and I'm gonna give it a name. I'm gonna say BigI that's there, BigIP2-config. Now, how about we go with that? Encryption, I'm not gonna encrypt it. Now if I was in production, I would. All right, super. And it shows me the version here that I'm running. So go ahead and click Finished. And it's gonna go ahead and create that Archive or Backup. Now again, this Archive contains everything you need to get back up and running with all your Config Settings, all your Certificates, all your Keys, all that stuff.

1:46All right, super. It says status is okay. So I'll say, OK here. Now, I can go ahead and click on the name here. Let's click on that, it's gonna take me into it. And I can click on the Download button right here. So I'm gonna click on that. So now I'm downloaded. There we go, super. My Backup, so I have my backup now, so I'm good there. So we got a Backup. Next thing we need to do is jump into the TMOS. So now I'm gonna bring in a terminal here. There we go, super. And you see we're in Big-IP2 and I'm in the Linux here.

2:17So I need to go ahead and jump into the TMOS. So let's do that. Let's TMSH on over there. Excellent. I'm in the TMOS. Now the command I want to run is load/sys. There we go. Config verify. Now let's talk about this. What we're doing is loading the system configuration and we're verifying it. We're not gonna make any changes. All we're doing is letting the Big-IP go through and verify the configuration to make sure there's nothing in there that's a misconfiguration that might cause a problem with the upgrade.

2:48That's all we're doing. So I'm gonna hit Enter. It's just going through and verifying the configuration of the system to make sure there's nothing that might cause a problem with our upgrade. And as long as we don't get any errors, then we are okay. And usually this just takes a few seconds and there it goes. No errors, so we're good to go there. So we checked our configuration, that's awesome. Now, something you might have to do is to go ahead and reactivate your license. And that does force a reload of the configuration, which is fine.

3:18But if you do get prompted or for some reason need to go ahead and reactivate your license, there's a couple different ways you can do it. So we can actually run a command here from our TMOS to go ahead and do that. And the first command we're gonna run though is show/sys license. There we go. And hit Enter. And here is my license. So I'm gonna copy that, just like that, excellent. And it shows you your active modules and such in there, super duper.

3:48And I'm gonna hit Q to end that. Now to actually reactivate this, so I just did the Show Command, which was this one right here, so that we can show the license so we can copy and paste it. Now in order to reactivate it, what I'm going to do is use the command install/sys license registration-key and then paste that in there, just like that. And it's gonna go through and reactivate that license. Super, so if that's how to do it via the Terminal.

4:20So it just finished, it says, New License Installed. That's just really, it's just going out and verifying that you own the license. It's a real license, it's checking it now. It's restarting our SNMP service. So let me move that out of the way. All right, so again, if you're gonna do this via the WebUI, now, we wanna go to System and License. So if I'm down here in System, I wanna go down here to License right here. Click on that and we see the License here. All we would do is click on the Re-activate button down here in the bottom left. It's that's simple and we don't need to do that, 'cause I just did it via the Command Line instead.

4:54So there you go, that's how to do it either way. And now, we are actually ready to do the upgrade. So we've done our preparation, we did our backup or archive, so we have a copy of all of our configurations and stuff. We went through and we verified the config to make sure there are no errors, and then we went ahead and reactivated the license. And again, we are now ready to do our upgrade. So we're gonna start that in the next nugget. See ya there shortly.

0:00It is finally time to perform our upgrade on our big IP, and that's what we're gonna do. So I'm here on my big IP. This is our big IP-2, and that's our 192.168.121.12. And if I go to my, down here under system, and I go down to software management and click on that, it's gonna show me I'm running version 17.0.0, build, 0.0.22. This is very important here. I'm running on disk HD1, boot location, HD1.1.

0:31Again, very important. You need to record this, okay? Super. All right. So what's the first step? Well, first step is we've already downloaded our ISO file. We did our MD5 checksum comparison. So now it's time to upload this ISO so that we can have it here and upgrade it from. So I have zero available images here, so I can't upgrade from anything. So what I need to do is go over here to the far right and go to import. Excellent. Choose file. I'm doing my ISO file, and there's that MD5 file we used to check our checksum.

1:06So I'm gonna say open, and I'm going to say import. Now it's gonna go through the process of importing it. I love that it gives you a progress, lets you know you know how you're doing. Super. So it's gonna go ahead and upload the ISO file. Once that is complete, I'm gonna jump back in here, and we will continue with the upgrade. So I'll see you there here shortly. I'm just gonna pause the video. Okay, I am back, and you'll see it's only a 10% right now. But what I wanted to show you is I'm gonna bring in a terminal here, and we are in our Linux here.

1:37So I'm gonna jump over to our traffic management shell, our TMOS operating system. There we go. Super. Now what I wanted to show you is a command, and that is list forward slash sys software image, and hit enter. There's nothing there. That's right. This is a way via the TMSH to check your software images that are available. Now once this completes its upload, we're gonna run this command again, and I should then see my ISO file in there so that I can upgrade to. So I just wanted to show you that real quick.

2:08I'm actually gonna go ahead and re-pause this, and we'll be back when it finishes. All right, we are back, and the upload has completed. Once it completes, it goes back to this screen here, and it shows us a nice check here, and we have our software image. I'm gonna actually go ahead and copy that real quick. There we go. And it shows this as version 17.1.0.2, and the image size is a BIG-IP image verified and available. Super duper. Now what I'm going to do is bring back our terminal here, and I'm just gonna hit the up arrow and hit enter.

2:42And now we see we have our software image here available for use. Let me move this down just a hair. There we go. So this is the name here, right there, and that's important, so we're gonna need that here in a minute. All right, super. Let's go back through here. Now, what is next? Well, now we uploaded it, and you can do this ahead of time, of course. You don't wanna wait 'til the time of upgrade to do this. So during your preparations, you're gonna go ahead and upload so it's ready to go for your upgrade.

3:12So what we're going to do now is install it. Pretty straightforward. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on that and click the install. And now I have a popup window. So it says here, select disk HD1. That's what we're gonna go with. And volume set name. Now what we're gonna do is put a number in here and I'm gonna put number two, and I'll tell you why. If we look up here under the boot location, it's HD1.1, and that means it's on a volume set called one.

3:43HD1 is the hard drive, dot one is the boot volume, okay? So what we wanna do is put number two in here because by doing that, it's gonna create a new boot volume, and it's going to install this to the new boot volume. That way we have the old operating system on one boot volume, the new on another. So if something goes horribly wrong with the upgrade, we can always boot from the old system. So keep that in mind, very handy. Now, I'm not gonna install it just yet because I wanna show you, you can do this from the terminal as well.

4:15So here we go. So let's slide this up. Now, what you wanna do is we copied this up here 'cause you're gonna need that. The command you're gonna do to install this is install forward slash sys, space, software, space, image. I'm gonna paste in the image name. Then I'm gonna type volume HD1.2, two is the new number, space, create dash volume. And that's because it's gonna create that new volume two on hard drive one.

4:45And I see that I actually typoed that. It should be HD, not DH. There we go. So that's how you would do it from the command line if you wanted to, but we're not going to, we're gonna do it via the web UI so you can see what that looks like. But I wanted to show you the command so you know what it is and that you can actually do that. So there you go. Now let me go ahead and get rid of this command because we're going to go ahead and start the process on the web UI, and then I'm gonna show you a command you can use to look at the process status from within the terminal here.

5:24So let me move that outta the way. All right, so we're gonna go ahead, and we're back here in the web UI. We've got this set HD1. We're gonna use volume set name two, and I'm gonna click install. And now it's going to start the install process, and it's installing it but it's not showing me anything here. So what I want to do is show you a command you can run that I was gonna show you anyway from the terminal. And here it is. Show sys software. And if you look down here, it says HD1.1.

5:54This is active and running. Status complete. But if you look at the next line, HD1.2, BIG_IP. This one here is in the process of installing, all right? That lets us know that it is installing. There we go. All right, super. So now we just kind of give it some time to finish installation. So, I'll be back. All right, we're back. It's still installing, but you'll see now that the BIG-IP has a little clock here. And over here under install status, we have a progress bar.

6:29And I was a little confused because I didn't see the progress bar I was expecting to see 'cause I've seen it in the past from doing upgrades. So what I did was, for some reason, it just didn't refresh. So I just went simply back to system, software management, and it refreshed the page, and it showed up. So I just wanted to make sure to show you that because for some reason it didn't just automatically pop up, which it normally does. Interesting. All right, so I'll be back when this finishes. All right, we're back and the upgrade has completed. Now here's the thing.

6:59Remember, we created a new boot sector, which is number two on HD1. And if we look up here at our images installed, our installed images, we see our currently running HD 1.1, 'cause we haven't rebooted or anything. We're on there, old 17.0.0, 0.0.2. But on our HD1.2 sector, we've got 17.1.0.2, 0.0.2, which we just installed. However, it's not active. So if we look at the active column here, we can obviously see it's not active.

7:31Now, the default boot is set to the old image, which is fine. So what we want to do, we wanna go over here to boot locations at the top. We're gonna click on that. I'm gonna go and click on the link for my HD1.2. Click on that. All right, so here we are in our boot location, HD1.2, and we can see the version it's running is 17.1.0.2, 0.0.2. All right. And under install configuration, now keep in mind, we just installed, from an ISO, a blank 17.1.0.2 version, okay?

8:09So there's no configurations on it. So if we went and just clicked on Activate to make this the active boot location, it's going to reboot and boot up with 17.1.0.2 but no configurations. That's not what we want. So install configuration, we wanna move that to yes. And then for our source volume, we only have one option here, HD1.1, which is running 17.0.0. And that's fine. That's what we wanna select because it's gonna pull the configuration from our source volumes. Now all we have to do is click Activate, and it's going to then go ahead and reboot into the new image.

8:45So let's go ahead and do that. Activate. And are you sure you wanna do it? Yes please. Thank you very much. So it's gonna receive the configuration from our device now, and then it's gonna go ahead and do a reboot and come up on HD1.2, running 17.1.0.2, 0.0.2. So I'm gonna go ahead and pause the video here and let it do its thing. Okay, I wanted to show you this because it just switched to this screen. This is our BIG-IP2. It says, "Please wait while the device reboots."

9:15And it's going through and shutting down services and such. So I'll come back when it's finished and time to log in. All right, we are back. And as we can see here, it says, "Start up in progress. Reboot complete." So we can now log in. So let's go ahead and do that. Log in admin, put our password in. There we go. Super. And it's booting up here. All right, and we'll give this just a minute. Super. Let's go down to system. Let's go to software management, and let's take a look. All right, so as we can see here, BIG-IP is 17.1.0.2, 0.0.2 on HD1.2 is now active and the default boot.

9:55Super. But if we wanted to, we could boot back into our old version if we wanted to for some reason. Maybe we had a problem with booting into this one at some point. And there you go. So what you could do is go down here and go ahead and delete that image, that ISO, 'cause we don't need to keep the ISO on there anymore. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that. There we go. And it's simply 'cause again, we don't need it. We used it to create our new boot location so it's no longer needed. Super. So that was a successful upgrade to 17.1.0.2 from 17.0.0.

10:29Now I do wanna show you real quick, I wanna bring a terminal in here. If there were problems during the upgrade, there is actually a log. So if you do ls, this is just in the Linux partition, not the TMOS, ls/var/log, hit Enter. The liveinstall.log right there. So what I'm gonna do is cat /var/log liveinstall.log, pipe more. It's gonna let us scroll through it. Hit enter. And here you go. This is the log it created from installing the upgrade.

11:00So as you can scroll down and take a look, it's adding various packages and doing all this fun stuff for us. It's going through and doing all these things. You can see all the activities so you could see any errors in here, but of course you'd wanna contact support for assistance with a failed upgrade. But I just wanna show you that this log does exist and whatever it is and what it is called. So that's how we perform an upgrade on a BIG-IP.

0:00All right, sounds like your manager has assigned you the task of figuring out what the latest version of the BIG-IP software you can upgrade your BIG-IP to. And your office has a standalone BIG-IP 7055s type D 110 device. And it's currently running version 16.0.1. So what is the latest version of software we can use? So we're gonna need to use our hardware/software compatibility matrix. And we were given the information we need.

0:30We're running a BIG-IP 7055s. So let's go down here to the hardware and find that. And basically the best way to do this is just do a control F or search for it. So we're gonna do 7055s. There it is. All right, so now that we have that, let me close that out. We know that's right there. If I scroll up here, and our compatible software versions is at the top, we can see that we're running 16.0.1 is what we were told, and that's in here.

1:04So we can upgrade to 16.1.3, but it doesn't look like we can upgrade to anything in the 17 family. So it sounds like 16.1.3 is the latest version of BIG-IP software that we can run on our physical BIG-IP appliance. Now, how would we get to 17 if we wanted to? Let's say there was some new feature that we really wanted in 17. Well, we would have to upgrade to a new device. So, of course, we have to go through that process.

1:35But once you get the new device in place, well, you would have a newer type, so you'd be able to run version 17. So there you go, that answers our question. The answer is 16.1.3 is the latest version we can run on our appliance. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.