F5 OpenStack Heat Integration¶

F5’s OpenStack Heat Integration consists of the F5 Heat template library and F5 Heat Plugins for OpenStack.

General Prerequisites¶

Warning

Active development of Heat Orchestration templates for BIG-IP version 13 and later has moved to the f5-openstack-hot repo in GitHub.

The F5 OpenStack Heat Integration’s documentation set assumes that you:

already have an operational OpenStack Deployment with OpenStack Neutron and OpenStack Heat installed; [1]
are familiar with OpenStack Horizon and the OpenStack CLI ; and
are familiar with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) concepts and the BIG-IP configuration utility (aka, the BIG-IP admin web interface).
have a BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) qcow.zip image file (any size) licensed appropriately for your needs. [2]

Caveats¶

You must host your BIG-IP VE image in a location accessible via ‘http’. The F5 Heat templates can not retrieve files via ‘https’. File uploads via OpenStack Horizon are not supported.
BIG-IP VE images come in different sizes. Choose the correct F5 flavor for your image.

Heat Plugins¶

The F5 Heat Plugins for OpenStack enable BIG-IP objects for use in OpenStack. The Heat plugins use the F5 Python SDK to communicate with BIG-IP via the iControl REST API.

Install the F5 Plugins for Heat

Heat Templates¶

You can use the F5-Supported Heat templates to provision resources and BIG-IP services in an OpenStack cloud. F5’s Heat templates follow the OpenStack Heat Orchestration Template (HOT) specification. You can use the templates in conjunction with F5 iApps to deploy BIG-IP VE instances and Local Traffic Manager services.

Warning

The F5 Heat template library contains supported and unsupported templates. The unsupported templates provided in the f5-openstack-heat GitHub repo are ‘use-at-your-own-risk’.

Templates in the unsupported directory are not supported by F5, regardless of your account’s support agreement status.

Browse the F5-Supported Heat templates