Introduction

I’ve been working with vRO F5 plugin recently and found an interesting behaviour that I would like to share. In this blog post, it will be discussing:

1. Environment
2. Task
3. Interesting Behaviour
4. Wrap-Up

Environment

The following is the list of products with versions I used:

1. vRealize Orchestrator version 5.5
2. F5 version 11.5.2
3. F5 vRO plugin version 2.0.1

Task

The task I tried to achieve with the F5 vRO plugin is to:

1. Attach LTM server from vRO
2. Create a pool under a partition called “Production”
3. Add a member under the pool created
4. Delete the pool

And the list of built in workflows attached below:

First of all, I tried to attach LTM server by running “Attach LTM” workflow:

F5 plugin version 1.x.x uses SOAP API and from 2.0.0, they introduced a new support for REST API. As I wanted to stick to SOAP API, I’ve set false to REST API flag and clicked Submit.

As per the task above, second step was to create a pool under Production partition. Running the “Create Pool” workflow, inputs required were:

1. LTM Instance
2. Name for pool
3. Method

As shown below, there was no input to specify which partition I wanted to create a pool in:

Wanted to check which partition the pool goes into. Executed the workflow with the attached LTM server giving a name “StevenTest”.

Looking at the Logs tab:

And the F5 Pools List page:

As expected, it was created under Common partition. How could I add a pool under Production partition? One thing came up in my mind was, what would happen if I give the full path i.e. /Production/StevenTest as the name. This time, for the name, I used /Production/StevenTest1:

Wallah, it worked! The pool was created under Production partition:

On the pool I created, I executed “Add Pool Member” workflow to add a member to it. One of the inputs was LTM Pool. Clicked on it and found out that I couldn’t see /Production/StevenTest1 pool:

So by the look of it, only pools in Common partition could be found. Why is this the case?

Interesting Behaviour

I was looking at all API calls, blog posts from F5, literally everything I could but there was no luck to fix this issue. Then I realised that would this still be the case if I use REST API instead of SOAP API? I gave it a go, detached the LTM server and attached it again enabling REST API:

Once done, I navigated to Inventory Tab and expanded F5 Networks and guess what, the pool created under Production partition was there:

Ran “Add Pool Member” workflow again using port 443:

And checking the member created from Members tab on F5 interface, it was successfully made under Production path.

The final step was to delete pool. Ran “Delete a pool” workflow selecting /Production/StevenTest1 pool:

Looking at the pools list from F5 interface, it was gone:

Wrap-Up

The behaviour I found, wondering if this is a bug. Will be sending an email to F5 vRO plugin to confirm if it is the case. Otherwise, will try to get a solution or workaround. Will update this post once I get an answer from them.

Hope this was helpful and feel free to leave a message for any clarifications 😀