Use Case 04: Application Maintenance

OVERVIEW

Application-Maintenance.yaml is a templated Ansible Playbook that demonstrates the ability to change the state (enable/disable/offline) of traffic flowing to web-server(s) in a load balancing pool.

There are times where web servers are taken offline to provide upgrades, troubleshooting, or even replacement.

This playbook allows the ability to enable, disable or offline a specific or array of pool members (e.g. [hostname]:[port] or [ip address]:[port]); This script can also affect “All” of the members of a selected pool.

RUNNING THE TEMPLATE

Running this template assumes that a F5 BIG-IP instance, necessary webservers and Ansible node are available.

  1. Login to the Ansible host

  2. Change Directory in the Ansible Host to the use-cases repo previously downloaded

    cd ~/f5-bd-ansible-labs/201-F5-Advanced/Modules/04-Application-Maintenance

  3. (Optional) Edit ‘f5_vars.yml’ file to customize your variables for your environment.

  4. Run the Ansible Playbook ‘Application-Maintenance.yaml’ with the variable file ‘f5_vars.yml’:

    ansible-navigator run Application-Maintenance.yaml --mode stdout -e @f5_vars.yml

    Note

    By default a VIP and pool will be created during the execution of the code, then the code will disable a single node in that created pool.

    Modification of the f5_vars.yml file can change the pool, node(s) and state which can be modified within the f5_vars.yml.

TESTING AND VALIDATION

This section assumes knowledge of how to operate BIG-IP commands and networking.

VERIFYING NODE MAINENANCE:

Access Using F5 UDF Console:

Using the External Client (UDF –> Components –> External Client –> Access –> Firefox)

  • In the Bookmarks bar you can select the Ansible Labs Folder and goto 201 - Labs and Select Use Case 4

  • OR within the browser you can browse to https://10.1.20.30:8083/

  • Browse the page and notice that only NODE2 is the only responsive Node as Node 1 was disabled.

BIG-IP CONFIGURATION VERIFICATION:

Using F5 UDF:

  • BIG-IP - (In UDF –> Components –> BIG-IP –> Access –> TMUI) - This will popup a webpage to access the F5 Login Page

    • Login to the BIG-IP

    • Navigate to Local Traffic –> Pools

    • Click on the pool you selected while running the playbook

    • View the members of the pool and verify their state based on action choosen while running the playbook

  • Login information for the BIG-IP:

    • username: admin

    • password: found in the inventory hosts file