Overview

Infrastructure

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is a platform that you use as a tool to help you manage BIG-IP devices and all of their services (such as LTM, AFM, ASM, and so forth), from one location. BIG-IQ can manage up to 600 (physical, virtual, or vCMP) BIG-IP devices and handle licensing for up to 5,000 unmanaged devices.

Using BIG-IQ helps you more efficiently manage your BIG-IP devices. That means you and your co-workers don’t have to log in to individual BIG-IP systems to get your job done. Instead, you can discover, upgrade, deploy policy changes, manage licenses, and more, from just one place.

From BIG-IQ, you can manage a variety of tasks from software updates to health monitoring, and traffic to security. And because permissions for users are role-based, you can limit access to just a few trusted administrators to minimize downtime and potential security issues. You can also allow users to view or edit only those BIG-IP objects that they need to do their job.

An F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management solution can involve a number of different elements. The topology for these elements depends on your needs, and on whether you include data collection devices (DCDs) in your solution. A typical solution can include the following elements:

• BIG-IQ system(s)
• BIG-IP devices
• Data collection devices
• Remote storage devices

BIG-IQ Centralized Management system

Using BIG-IQ Centralized Management, you can centrally manage your BIG-IP devices, performing operations such as backups, licensing, monitoring, and configuration management. And because access to each area of BIG-IQ is role-based, you can limit access to users, thus maximizing work flows while minimizing errors and potential security issues.

BIG-IP device

A BIG-IP device runs a number of licensed components that are designed around application availability, access control, and security solutions. These components run on top of F5 TMOS. This custom operating system is an event-driven operating system designed specifically to inspect network and application traffic, and make real-time decisions based on the configurations you provide. The BIG-IP software runs on both hardware and virtualized environments.

Data collection device

A data collection device (DCD) is a specially provisioned BIG-IQ system that you use to manage and store alerts, events, and statistical data from one or more BIG-IP systems.

Configuration tasks on the BIG-IP system determine when and how alerts or events are triggered on the client. The alerts or events are sent to a data collection device in a BIG-IQ Centralized Management deployment, and the BIG-IQ system retrieves them for your analysis. When you opt to collect statistical data from the BIG-IP devices, the DCD periodically retrieves those statistics from your devices, and then processes and stores that data.

The group of data collection devices and BIG-IQ systems that work together to store and manage your data are referred to as the data collection cluster. The individual data collection devices are generally referred to as nodes.

Remote storage device

You need a remote storage device only when your deployment includes a data collection device (DCD) and you plan to store backups of your events, alerts, and statistical data for disaster recovery requirements. You also need remote storage so that you can retain this data when you upgrade your software.

Network environment for simple device management and configuration

To deploy a simple device management and configuration environment, all you need is one or more BIG-IQ systems and the BIG-IP devices that you want to manage. The number of BIG-IQ systems you need depends on how much redundancy your business requires. A second system provides high availability failover capability.

The simple management and configuration solution uses a single management network. The BIG-IQ system uses traffic on the management network to do these things:

• Enable bidirectional traffic between the BIG-IQ systems and the BIG-IP devices.
• Enable traffic between the BIG-IQ systems. If you use a secondary high availability BIG-IQ system, this traffic keeps the state information synchronized.
• Provide access to the BIG-IQ user interface. You can also use the management network to access the BIG-IQ system using SSH if you need to run manual commands.

Note: The number of devices of each type that will best meet your company’s needs depends on a number of factors. Refer to the F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management: Data Collection Device Sizing Guide on support.f5.com for details.