F5 LTM VE–Setting up basic load balancing (CLI!)

So since I’m such a huge CLI guy I thought that I’d go back through my previous F5 LTM VE posts and do it all through the CLI. To be honest, Im brushing up on the topic so that I can someday sit the F5 exams. Not sure when that will be but I’m hoping soon. So, I deployed the OVA template into VMWare again and I’m going to do the full setup again. Not as much explanation this time but I’ll walk through it.

Management IP
Boot the VM up, log in with default credentials, launch the config wizard, setup your management IP.

License
Fire up a SSH connection to the management IP you configured. At the command prompt enter the following command…

get_dossier –b

This will kick out the dossier file. Copy the dossier, browse over to activate.f5.com, select the activation method you are looking for, and enter your dossier. After accepting the terms you should get a license file kicked back to you that looks something like this…

Copy the entire text contents of the text box and head back to your SSH session. Edit the contents of /config/bigip.license with vi…

vi /config/bigip.license

Its a new file so go into insert mode and past the contents. Write the file and then issue the following command to restart the BigIp processes

bigstart restart

You should notice that your prompt changed from ‘NO LICENSE’ to ‘INOPERATIVE’ after the restart. That’s a good sign.

Hostname
tmsh modify sys global-settings hostname LTM2.interubernet.local

Create VLANs
tmsh create net vlan external interfaces add {1.2}
tmsh create net vlan internal interfaces add {1.1}

Create Self IPS
tmsh create net self 10.20.20.40/24 vlan external
tmsh create net self 192.168.1.40/24 vlan internal

Create HTTP_POOL Pool
tmsh create ltm pool HTTP_POOL load-balancing-mode round-robin members add {192.168.1.41:80 192.168.1.42:80 192.168.1.43:80}

Create HTTP_TEST Virtual Server
tmsh create ltm virtual HTTP_TEST destination 10.20.20.40:80 profiles add {tcp http} pool HTTP_POOL snat automap

Save the config
tmsh save sys config

And that’s it! You should be able to hit 10.20.20.40 and see round robin traffic between the three web servers.