Migrate and Upgrade

Almost every F5 estate has a migration in front of it: iSeries and VIPRION platforms reaching end of support, TMOS releases falling out of software development, vCMP guests becoming F5OS tenants, applications moving to cloud, and BIG-IP 21.1 waiting as the next long-term release. We plan and run these migrations so applications move without their users noticing.

Migrations we deliver

• iSeries and VIPRION to rSeries and VELOS – configuration conversion with F5’s Journeys tooling, F5OS tenant design, and staged cut-overs per traffic group or application.
• TMOS upgrades – 13.x through 17.x to 17.5 or 21.1, with pre-upgrade certification, memory and iRules LX checks for the 64-bit control plane, hotfix selection and rollback plans.
• vCMP to F5OS tenancy – mapping guests to tenants, vCPU and memory allocations, and the networking changes F5OS introduces.
• Other vendors to BIG-IP – Citrix NetScaler, A10, HAProxy, NGINX Open Source and cloud-native load balancers, converted to LTM, DNS, APM and Advanced WAF configurations.
• On-premise to cloud – Virtual Editions in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud with the same policies and monitoring as the data center.
• 17.x to BIG-IP 21.1 – the long-term release that replaced the BIG-IP Next roadmap: platform eligibility (rSeries, VELOS and VE only), UCS platform-migration validation and certification before cut-over.

How we cut over

Two methods cover most estates: VIP address migration, where new platforms share the data-center VLANs and take over virtual addresses in a maintenance window, and DNS or Wide IP migration, where applications move one at a time behind BIG-IP DNS. Both come with pre-built rollback, automated verification of every virtual server, and a migration report your change board can sign off.