The F5® LBaaSv2 driver and F5 agent can manage multiple BIG-IP environments. In a differentiated service environment – a uniquely-named environment for which dedicated F5 LBaaS services are required – the F5 driver has its own, uniquely-named messaging queue. The F5 LBaaS agent scheduler for a differentiated service environment can only assign tasks to agents running in that environment.
The service environment corresponds to the environment_prefix parameter in the Agent Configuration File. when you create a new lbaas-loadbalancer in OpenStack, this prefix is prepended to the OpenStack tenant id and used to create a new partition on your BIG-IP® device(s). The default environment_prefix parameter is Project.
Differentiated service environments can be used in conjunction with Capacity-Based Scale Out to provide agent redundancy and scale out across BIG-IP device groups.
The default service environment, Project, corresponds to the generic F5Networks service provider driver entry in the Neutron LBaaS configuration file (/etc/neutron/neutron_lbaas.conf).
Important
Each unique service environment must have a corresponding service provider driver entry. You can use the F5 Environment Generator to easily create a new environment and configure Neutron to use it.
Differentiated service environments can be used to manage LBaaS objects for unique environments, which may have requirements that differ from those of other service environments.
You can use the F5 Environment Generator to automatically generate, and configure Neutron to use, a new service provider driver for a custom environment. On each Neutron controller which will host your custom environment, run the following command:
$ sudo add_f5agent_environment <env_name>
The environment name is limited to 8 characters in length.
environment_prefix parameter to match the name of your custom environment.