How to do migration from Cisco ACE to F5 load balancer

[f5loadbalancer]

Hello Everyone,

Can anyone help me with step by step information of how to migrate from CISCO ACE to F5 load balancer?

My company is migrating from ACE to F5 and I am not sure as to how to do the migrations process.

Please email and document to f5loadbalancer@gmail.com

Please do the needful. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

Talk to F5.

if you just spent $50,000 on new hardware, I suspect it comes with support. An F5 BigIP is not trivial to set up.

 

[f5loadbalancer]

Company already got the f5 equipment. However, i am not sure of who has gone through the training and support.

I am looking for some steps which can make me understand as to how does the migration takes place and what are the prerequisites.

 

[spidey07]

You'll have to do it manually. Get the configs off the ACE and document every single VIP, the real servers and health probes, etc.

It's a total pain in the ass depending on how many VIPs. Oh how I despise the ACE.

Then setup all the rservers and serverfarms on the F5 and to migrate setup/enable the VIPs on the F5 and disable them on the ACE.

 

[f5loadbalancer]

Thank you so much Spidey07,

However, want to know if you have any screen shot or any documents which and explain in step-by-step process or if you can just reply the steps.

Like setting up of rservers and serverfarms on f5 and want to know if we can use CLI or do we manually do it in GUI?

Its a big project and i dont want to mess it up and loose my job.

Hope you understand.

 

[sactwnguy]

There is no specific process that can be easily put together because there are too many variables. Every application has different requirements when it is put on a load balancer. If you don't have the talent in house you should really get a contractor who does have it. There are a lot of little quirks that can cause you problems unless you have done this before. One example would be if you are going from ace to F5 and you are using nexus vpc with hsrp you had better have peer gateway turned on or the way f5 does routing with auto next hop is going cause your users to lose their connections randomly. Good luck with the migration.

 

[spidey07]

Yeah, this isn't something you can just do or follow a manual. Folks are paid extremely handsomely to do what OP is asking for and the reason why is they have tons of experience doing it.

How many VIPs and rservers/serverfarms? If it's just 20 VIPs with 80 rservers it might not be too difficult if you document every single thing up front. But honestly, it's not something for a novice to attempt.

 

[Cooky]

Slightly off subject, but between NetScaler and Big-IP, which one do you guys like better, and which one is more similar to Cisco ACE, in terms of design, config, and operation?

We too, will need to migrate from ACE to something else, but haven't decided on replacement.

 

[f5loadbalancer]

Can someone help me with the bullet points for preparing the presentation on migration from CISCO CSS to F5 Load balancer.

Please, would appreciate it.

 

[alpineranger]

F5 offers free online courses to go over the typical stuff like LTM setup.
Google for F5 University. As far as I know you don't need a service contract to get access. However, I wouldn't recommend running something like this in production without a service contract in place.

F5 products are generally excellent, except for upgrades, but I'm probably biased (former BigIP developer).

 

[jituborah]

Please go through the below link....
https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/converting-a-cisco-ace-configuration-file-to-f5-big-ip-format

 

[~DC~]

Slightly off subject, but between NetScaler and Big-IP, which one do you guys like better, and which one is more similar to Cisco ACE, in terms of design, config, and operation?

We too, will need to migrate from ACE to something else, but haven't decided on replacement.

Both companies have multiple products so your question may be a bit too generic to answer.

If you have a Citrix XenApp environment, buying the correct Netscaler model will get you the same or similar features as the F5 BigIP models, saving the need to buy multiple appliances. We have both in our environment and until recently, have not used the Netscalers for anything outside our Citrix Infrastructure, but that is changing and we are in the process of transitioning from BigIP to Netscaler SDX. We have hundreds of WebSphere app servers that are load-balanced and health probed by the F5's and also have some of their GTM appliances.

 

[Pheran]

I always cringe when people post things like this online, it's a pretty clear sign that they don't have the technical experience they need to do the project and things will probably not go well.

If you don't have F5 experience at least start by setting it up in a lab environment so you can become familiar with the configuration process and concepts.