By: Lora Johnson
As the complexity of IT infrastructures continues to grow, so does the need for automation to simplify tasks that serve as a time suck for IT operations personnel. With vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), you can automate tasks from the simple — like creating a new user in Active Directory — to the most complex, such as executing the procedure for powering off an entire data center.
Figure 1: Using a workflow to license F5 BIG-IP can save your team a significant amount of time and resources
With Blue Medora’s Plug-in for F5 BIG-IP, you can easily extend vRO’s automation to your load balancer technology. In this blog, I’ll highlight five key vRO workflows that can transform your F5 BIG-IP environment and IT operations.
1. Create Pool
Creating load balancing pools for your servers, for instance, transforms your performance to ensure that you can respond to requests — even if your system is overloaded at the moment. Through the vRO Plug-in for F5 BIG-IP, you can automate this process so that every time you have a new server added to your IT environment, you can create a pool based on the out-of-the-box workflow available in the plug-in.
2. Manage Pool Members
Once you have your pools established, it can be tedious and time-consuming to add servers and resources to the pools. In addition, this can significantly drain time as your team monitors and manages this process in the future. Leveraging the “manage pool members” workflow within the F5 BIG-IP Plugin, streamline these requests based on parameters that you set in your system. This ensures that you are filling your pools with the correct resources so your end-users don’t experience any delays or hiccups in performance.
3. License BIG-IP
Depending on how often your team spins up environments, licensing for your BIG-IP environments can be extremely time consuming. The plug-in from Blue Medora includes an out-of-the-box workflow to enable your team to easily license when your environment needs it. Whether you are using virtual, physical or a combination of both, the workflow kicks off when you establish set parameters so never have to sacrifice performance.
4. Upload or Add iRule
Through iRules in F5 BIG-IP, garner control to manage any IP application traffic in your environment. For more information on iRules, check out F5’s article that provides an introduction to iRules and how you can use them.
Within the vRO Plug-in from Blue Medora, automate your iRule management — you can see how here. Considering that you can make these quite complex with the addition of multiple events and commands, automating iRules can eliminate the chance of user error and ensure on-time execution every time.
5. Add Standard Profile to Virtual Server
Whether you have 50 or 500 virtual servers, managing these can take a significant amount of time. Configuring your virtual servers can improve performance, particularly if you add a standard profile. Establishing standard profiles for your virtual servers can improve the speed at which they can process requests, which ultimately, improves the overall performance of your IT environment. However, the trade-off in the past required a resource dedicated to managing these configurations — and often times, this fell low on the priority list.
Setting up a workflow enables you to automate this process — so whenever you spin up a new virtual server, you can automatically add the standard profile requirements to amplify performance off the bat.
In addition to these five workflows, you can experience an additional 200+ with the Blue Medora vRO Plug-in for F5 BIG-IP. To learn more or download a free trial, visit Blue Medora’s website.
