Replace F5 BIG-IP edition in an HA pair

This repo is a guide to changing the BIG-IP edition of a production HA pair in Google Cloud with minimal disruption to traffic and preserving your infrastructure-as-code state so it matches actual infrastructure resources for each stage of the process. For example, you can upgrade from Good to Best+ edition, or transition VEs from PAYG to perpetual licenses (BYOL), or vice-versa.

While the examples are specific to GCP the general technique should be equally applicable to other private and public cloud deployments.

NOTE: These techniques cannot be used to change the BIG-IP version of the deployment - ConfigSync continues to manage cluster state and thus requires that the base BIG-IP versions are identical for all devices in the group.

Scenarios in this repo

Upstream F5 Solution	Upstream version	Linked scenario(s)	Notes
GDM v1 via-API, 3nic, PAYG	v4.3.0	Throughput change(25Mbps -> 1Gbps)

Approach taken

All the scenarios follow the basic steps:

Step 0: Starting point

• BIG-IP VE 1 and BIG-IP VE 2 are an existing HA pair deployed using one of F5's supported or community repositories
• The cluster is in a known-good state

Step 1: Expand the cluster

The first step is to add new VEs running target edition

NOTE: This step is specific to your starting point; in order to preserve IaC state and avoid future issues follow the directions in step-1-expand folder for your scenario.

• GDM v1 via API, 3nic, PAYG

• Two new BIG-IP VEs are added to GCP; BIG-IP VE 3 and BIG-IP VE 4
• BIG-IP VE 3 and BIG-IP VE 4 are functionally standalone
• All four VEs should be running the same set of extensions (e.g. DO, AS3, CFE - if applicable, etc.) and the same release versions of the extensions

Step 2: Extend BIG-IP HA configuration to new VEs

Good news! These steps are common to all the examples and could serve as a starting point if your specific scenario is not in this repo. A detailed walkthrough can be found in Modifying HA.

a. Extend device trust to include the new VEs

b. Force Offline the new VEs

c. Extend the failover group to the new VEs

d. Release Offline and force failover to a new VE

e. Reduce failover group to exclude the original VEs

f. Reduce device trust to exclude the original VEs

Step 3: Remove the original VEs from deployment

NOTE: This step is specific to your starting point; in order to preserve IaC state and avoid future issues follow the directions in step-3-reduce folder for your scenario.

• GDM v1 via API, 3nic, PAYG