# F5 BIG-IP Upgrade using Ansible

Introduction

This repo provides sample Ansible role to upgrade an F5 HA LB pair. The playbook uses modules from F5's BIG-IP Imperative Collection for Ansible documented at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/f5networks/f5_modules/index.html.

Features

• Pre-checks

  • Current HA status and sync check
  • Software image and availability checks
  • Restnoded and restjavad checks
  • SLB Virtual Server objects count, status check
  • Get Top 10 virtual servers based on current connections

• UCS and Qkview generation and download to local system

• Pre-upgrade tasks

  • Disable ha-group
  • Disable auto sync
  • Install software image
  • Set standby unit to offline mode

• Upgrade

  • Copy config to target volume
  • Activate volume
  • Wait for device to reboot and become ready

• Failover Traffic to upgraded unit

• Post-upgrade tasks

  • Check if unit with new version is in standby state

  • SLB Virtual Server objects count, status check and compare with other unit

  • Enable ha-group

  • Enable auto sync

Environment

Tested on a pair of BIG-IP VEs.

Steps

• Clone repo

git clone git@github.com:jbollineni/f5-bigip-upgrade-ansible.git
cd f5-bigip-upgrade-ansible

• Create and activate python virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

• Add upgrade pair FQDNs to hosts.yml file.

• Create group_vars file corresponding to the hosts in hosts.yml

• Add credentials to all group_vars file.

• Run playbook

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yml playbooks/f5_lb_upgrade.yml