Lab 3.2: Upgrade and scale-up our SSG

In the previous lab, we have updated our Cloud Environment. We can now replace the instances running in our SSG SSGClass2.

In the BIG-IQ UI, go to Applications > Environments > Service Scaling Groups and click on your SSG SSGClass2.

Click on the Configuration tab, and then Devices. This is where you can review the SSG devices that has been deployed.

Warning

we recommend to change one device at a time for such process

Select the device called SSGClass2-1.f5demo.local and click on the Replace button.

As soon as you do this, you’ll trigger the replacement of this device by another using our updated Cloud Environment. You’ll see a yellow alert at the top that will look like this

Note

the replacement process is not restricted by the Maximum Devices(s) Required limit you have defined in your SSG. It you were already at the maximum capacity of your SSG the replacement would still happen

You can monitor the deployment of the new instance :

• via the log files orchestrator.log and restjavad.0.log on BIG-IQ
• via the alerts available in the BIG-IQ UI
• monitor the vCenter interface (here you can also check that it has 4 vCPUs instead of 2)

After some time, you’ll see the new device being discovered by BIG-IQ:

Note

During this process, you’re still able to deploy applications on top of this SSG

The device will be fully discovered:

Here BIG-IQ will push the applications on this SSG device. Once it’s done, it will remove the device SSGClass2-1.f5demo.local and the yellow banner at the top will disappear

This is the process to do on each device that needs to be replaced. We would need to repeat this task on SSGClass2-2.f5demo.local to finalize our upgrade/scale-up of our SSG. This won’t be needed for this lab.

As you have seen, the upgrade and scale-up process are identical and can be done at the same time if needed