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Manage BIG-IP Clusters with F5 LBaaSv2¶
Overview¶
The F5® LBaaSv2 agent and driver can manage BIG-IP® device service clusters, providing high availability, mirroring, and failover services within your OpenStack cloud.
The F5 agent applies LBaaS configuration changes to each BIG-IP device in a cluster at the same time, in real time. It is unnecessary to use BIG-IP’s ‘configuration synchronization mode’ to sync LBaaS objects managed by the agent across the devices in a cluster.
Clustering provides a greater degree of redundancy than a standalone device offers. It helps to avoid service interruptions that could otherwise occur if a device should go down. F5 LBaaSv2 can manage BIG-IP Sync-Failover device groups when set to use either the pair or the scalen High Availability mode.
BIG-IP scalen cluster
Important
The F5 agent expects to find a specific number of entries for the icontrol_hostname parameter based on the configured f5_ha_type, as noted below.
| ha type | number of iControl endpoints |
|---|---|
| standalone | 1 |
| pair | 2 |
| scalen | > 2 |
F5 LBaaSv2 and BIG-IP Auto-sync¶
By design, F5 LBaaSv2 applies configuration directly to each device in a cluster or pair. Because of this functionality, we do not support the use of F5 LBaaSv2 with BIG-IP device clusters that are set to use auto-sync. If, for example, you create a load balancer for a device group that is set to use auto-sync, the create command will only succeed on the first device in the group; it will fail on the others because the object will have already been created via auto-sync.
For this reason, we recommend manually syncing BIG-IP device groups after making configuration changes with F5 LBaaSv2.
Caution
If you choose to enter only one (1) iControl endpoint for your device group and rely on auto-sync, you must set the f5_ha_type to standalone. Should you choose to do so, however, you will need to manually update the Agent Configuration File with the iControl endpoint of another device in the group should the configured device fail.
While it is possible to use auto-sync for a device group after creating a new load balancer, it is not recommended. This functionality has not been tested.
Prerequisites¶
Basic understanding of BIG-IP device service clustering.
Licensed, operational BIG-IP device service cluster.
Tip
If you do not already have a BIG-IP cluster deployed in your network, you can use the F5 BIG-IP: Active-Standby Cluster Heat template to create a two-device cluster.
Operational OpenStack cloud (Mitaka release).
Administrator access to both BIG-IP devices and OpenStack cloud.
F5 agent and service provider driver installed on the Neutron controller and all other hosts from which you want to provision LBaaS services.
Caveats¶
- The F5 agent can manage clusters of two (2) to four (4) BIG-IP devices. Active-standby mode can only be used with two (2) devices; scalen is used with clusters of more than two devices.
- The administrator login must be the same on all BIG-IP devices in the cluster.
Configuration¶
Edit the Agent Configuration File:
$ sudo vi /etc/neutron/services/f5/f5-openstack-agent.ini
Set the HA mode to pair or scalen.
# HA mode # # Device can be required to be: # # standalone - single device no HA # pair - active-standby two device HA # scalen - active device cluster # # f5_ha_type = pair # #Add the IP address for each BIG-IP device, the admin username, and the admin password to the Device Driver - iControl® Driver Setting section of the config file. Values must be comma-separated.
# icontrol_hostname = 10.190.7.232,10.190.4.193 # icontrol_username = admin # icontrol_password = admin #