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Ryujin's avatar
Ryujin
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Feb 20, 2024

Consolidate: Multi-tenancy HA

Hi all, 

 

I've spent the last week or so trawling through documentation and the forums trying to find out, if what I'm thinking about doing is possible. 

At the moment we have way more physical Viprion chassis than we need, we have recently been able to decomm some 2000 series appliances and we have some VE GTM's

 

We have an opportunity that might allow us to consolidate down and make life a little easier. We have a mix of deployment methodologies in use such as VCMP on a single Viprion, a Viprion HA (active/standby) between 2 DC's and a Viprion HA within one DC. If i attempt to push a huge migration of these various deployments it will never get anywhere. So i am hoping that i can achieve the following. 

Purchase 4 new appliances (R-series or Velos) use the multi-tenancy functionality on these 4 appliances. 2 appliances deployed in DC 1 and the other 2 in the DC 2. 

They would have tenants created on them that would support the existing HA deployments. See picture which hopefully depicts what I'm trying to explain, The dashed lines depict a HA relationship, hopefully its obvious that there is a mix of tenants that are in active / standby state across all 4 appliances. 

I am conscious of considering failure of an appliance and ensuring that the remaining appliances being able to cope with the load etc.

The other thing I am trying to be aware of, is that I can see that BIG-IP Next is coming within the next couple of years so ideally do not want to paint myself into a corner with this proposal. 

 

disclaimer ** F5 is not my typical wheelhouse, I am familiar with day to day use. I'm just struggling to find good documentation that rules out/in what I'm suggesting. I'm not afraid of doing the reading myself if anyone has a good link to read through, Also I'm open to different suggestions.

  • The other thing I am trying to be aware of, is that I can see that BIG-IP Next is coming within the next couple of years so ideally do not want to paint myself into a corner with this proposal. 

     

    Don't worry about BIG-IP Next, it is not compatible with VCMP/Tmos and also HA is different. Your proposal for the setup is fine. In time, you can run BIG-IP Next, next to the BIG-IP Tenants and migrate each virtual server individually.