BIG IP Live Install and Logical Volume Manager

F5 White Paper
BIG‑IP Live Install and Logical

Volume Manager
Use management and hardware virtualization to quickly and
transparently stage offline system upgrades and patches.
by Alan Murphy
Technical Marketing Manager
White Paper
BIG‑IP Live Install and Logical Volume Manager
Contents
Introduction 3
Live Install 3
Logical Volume Manager 5
Controlling Configuration Data 5
Conclusion 6
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White Paper
Introduction
One of the least used virtualization technologies in the data center is
management virtualization, yet this is one of the core tenants of any complete
virtual data center solution. Before any new virtualization technologies are
introduced to the data center they need to be a manageable part of the complete
virtual solution, meaning that once they’re deployed they can be controlled
throughout the virtual lifecycle. Nowhere is this truer than with application
delivery and service virtualization: two technologies that encompass multiple
components of the data center with the singular goal of delivering applications
outside the data center.
F5® BIG‑IP® Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) have included management

and hardware virtualization features since the introduction of F5’s carrier-class
ADC blade controller, VIPRION®. Management and hardware virtualization, used
in BIG‑IP’s Clustered Multiprocessing, administrative domains, and resource
provisioning, can help build and control a complete virtual application delivery
solution through the ADC. Through hardware virtualization, the Live Install
feature, new to BIG‑IP v10, extends F5’s management virtualization solution to
include virtualizing installation partitions and system image management.
Live Install
One of the challenges that has long troubled system, network, and application
administrators is how to manage upgrades and patches on mission-critical
systems. The BIG‑IP system, for example, is normally deployed in redundant pairs
which, along with providing a hardened and fault-tolerant application delivery
solution, provide flexibility for staging major and minor updates. This amounts to
updating the secondary, starting to bleeding traffic from the primary to test that
the upgrade was successful, making the secondary the primary, and repeating.
This staging procedure works well, but requires a substantial amount of
maintenance time to upgrade both devices and move application traffic between
devices. This is most apparent when the upgrades involve more than simple
patches—when there are core ADC software upgrades or major version releases.
Enter Live Install, a virtual staging solution for managing upgrades in real-time,
in parallel, with live application traffic.
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Live Install is a management virtualization solution that enables BIG‑IP

administrators to install and patch the currently running system image in a
separate partition without impacting the currently running system or application
traffic running through the BIG‑IP device. The administrator is able to stage the
new install/upgrade on each box, on their own schedule, without worrying about
interrupting application traffic. The install/upgrade can be loaded, installed,
and staged at any time, not just during a singular maintenance window. The
administrator can simply load a new system image on a newly created virtual
volume and walk away. Once the install/upgrade has been staged, it can be
quickly applied during the normal maintenance period with just a reboot.
This saves upgrade time and gives administrators more time for testing and
verification. After the new image has been applied, administrators can test
application traffic and verify the new image is working as expected. If there is
a problem, the pre-upgrade image can be rolled back with another reboot and
the process can repeat. This process drastically minimizes the risk exposure to
application traffic.
Another key feature of Live Install is the ability to reset a BIG‑IP device to a
baseline default configuration, such as the factory default or any set configuration
in the device’s life cycle. This is a handy feature for moving or repurposing BIG‑IP
devices throughout the organization. As devices are moved and reallocated from
one department to another, configurations can be easily reset so that the BIG‑IP
device can start in a new role, without legacy configuration settings.
BIG‑IP Live Install Configuration Screen
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White Paper
Logical Volume Manager

Live Install is based on Logical Volume Manager (LVM), a hardware virtualization
tool that enables you to dynamically add virtual storage space on the fly to your
BIG‑IP operating system. New images, upgrades, and patches are loaded into a
new dynamic storage volume while the current system is still live and processing
application traffic. These dynamic volumes are stored as long as needed; the
administrator is able to choose which volume is mounted as the boot partition
during the reboot process, selecting from any number of previously installed Live
Install partitions. Older stored volumes can also be dynamically removed during
run-time, if no longer needed, once new images are validated. Administrators are
able to keep a nearly limitless number of previous installations and configurations
live on the BIG‑IP device by using names specific to their internal release
management and naming conventions. Not only is this a unique and critical
solution for live BIG‑IP devices in production, it’s also a key feature for testing and
QA environments that need to test the performance of various BIG‑IP versions
and configurations with other applications.
Controlling Configuration Data

Either one of these technologies alone would be a powerful tool. The combined
solution of these two technologies is at the heart of F5’s powerful ADC, helping
to better manage application delivery in the data center. The combination of
hardware virtualization (LVM) and management virtualization (Live Install) enables
the granular management of the configuration of physical data stored on BIG‑IP
devices. This results in easier simplified management and configuration platform,
focused on application delivery. The combination of LVM and Live Install bring a
long list of features and benefits:
• R
unning System Image Management—Enables system images and
snapshots to be loaded while the system is running on multiple virtual
volumes. These images and snapshots can be used to store “last known
good” images, hotfix and incremental system versions, and testing and
QA images.
• V
irtual Volumes for Modules—LVM virtual volumes on BIG‑IP devices can
be allocated to both the core system for configuration images as well as
individually to specific modules such as the BIG‑IP® Application Security
Manager™ (ASM) and WebAccelerator™ modules. These modules can
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White Paper
use their private virtual volumes to store specific configuration information,

such as policies and cached data (WebAccelerator) and logs (BIG‑IP ASM).
• U
nique RAID Volume Managemen—LVM virtual volumes can be bound to
and spread across multiple RAID configurations, enabling the administrator
to choose the level of data fault tolerance and redundancy down to the
volume level.
Conclusion
BIG‑IP devices have long been a tool for applying “rolling upgrades” to the
applications and systems that sit behind the BIG‑IP device. With Live Install, this
“stage->reboot->go live” sequence can now be applied to the BIG‑IP device
directly, creating a rolling upgrade scenario like those of the application systems
behind it. Live Install also enables snapshot versioning for future versions of the
BIG‑IP system, a critical feature for both production and testing environments.
Controlling stateful data and staging BIG‑IP devices has never been easier;
by implementing both hardware and management virtualization, Live Install
enables “point in time” configurations that persist through future upgrades as
well as drastically reduce the planned upgrade and testing time required during
maintenance windows. Live Install is yet another BIG‑IP solution for enterprise-,
carrier-, and cloud-class application delivery virtualization.
F5 Networks, Inc. 401 Elliott Avenue West, Seattle, WA 98119 888-882-4447 www.f5.com
F5 Networks, Inc. F5 Networks F5 Networks Ltd. F5 Networks

Corporate Headquarters Asia-Pacific Europe/Middle-East/Africa Japan K.K.
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
WP-BIG-IP-Live-Install 03/09
© 2009 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, the F5 logo, BIG-IP, VIPRION, FirePass, and iControl are trademarks or registered trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc.
in the U.S. and in certain other countries.

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F5 White Paper

BIG‑IP Live Install and Logical

Logical Volume Manager 5

Controlling Configuration Data 5

F5® BIG‑IP® Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) have included management

Live Install is a management virtualization solution that enables BIG‑IP

BIG‑IP Live Install Configuration Screen

Logical Volume Manager

Controlling Configuration Data

use their private virtual volumes to store specific configuration information,

F5 Networks, Inc. F5 Networks F5 Networks Ltd. F5 Networks

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