Blue Medora vRO plugin for F5 BIG-IP

Lately I am trying to follow as much as I can about orchestration and automation and recently I followed a webinar from Blue Medora. This webinar was focused on the release of their vRealize Orchestrator plugin for F5 BIG-IP. This plugin enables automation of BIG-IP tasks such as auto-scaling, application provisioning, and automatic systems maintenance and patching.

The plugin will be fully supported by Blue Medora for vRealize Orchestrator versions 6 and 7, the F5 BIG-IP will need version 11.5.0+ to be supported.

Out of the box the plugin delivers 50 workflows and over 1.800 scriptable actions to be used in your environment. The plugin will make full usage of the F5 BIG-IP REST API’s allowing you to have full control over the F5 BIG-IP.  According to Blue Medora these are the Top 10 BIG-IP Workflows in vRealize Orchestrator:

• Create Pool
• Create Pool Member
• Create Virtual Server
• License BIG-IP
• Create Device Group
• Add Device to Device Group
• Update Management IP
• Upload/Add IRule
• Enable/Disable Pool Member
• Add Standard Profile to Virtual Server

Installing the vRO plugin is an easy proces and the installation guide that Blue Medora provides makes it even more so. To get the installation started you only need a few things:

• The plugin itself, which is a .DAR file
• Have the correct supported systems in place (vRO 6 / 7 and F5 BIG-IP 11.5.0+)
• vRO username / password of an account with Administrative level access
• F5 BIG-IP username / password of an account with Administrative level access
• vRO hostname or IP address
• Management IP or DNS name of the F5 BIG-IP system

Personally I think that adding the plugin to your vRO setup can really help in your infrstructure, that is ofcourse if you are using F5 BIG-IP ;)

If you want to try it out for yourself then you could request a trial from both Blue Medora and F5 BIG-IP. The BIG-IP is available in a virtual appliance so that should not have to be a problem.

Blue Medora plugin trial

F5 BIG-IP trial