20 Apr 2018

Setting A10 VRRP-A High Availability & aVCS & Upgrading with CLI

This is an experiment of A10 devices VRRP-A High Availability and aVCS configuration.

Purpose

Deploy a pair of AX 3530 devices as Active-Standby VRRP-A HA, which means One ACOS device is the primary SLB device for all virtual services on which HA is enabled. The other ACOS device is a hot Standby for the virtual services.
Upgrade system separately.

Experiment Materials

AX 3530 with system version 2.7.1-GR(build:58) x 2
Laptop
Finisar 1G Fibre Channel Optical Transceiver x 4
Console cable x 1
Fibre cable x 2
Ethernet cable x 1

Experiment Process

Basic Configuration

First, we connected A10 devices to laptop via a console cable plugged into the console port to check system version and deploy basic configurations like timezone.

clock timezone Asia/Shanghai

We named these two devices ADC005 and ADC006 with configurating management IP addresses 192.168.0.5 and 192.168.0.6 in configuration mode.

hostname ADC005
interface ethernet management
ip address 192.168.0.5 /24
ip default-gateway 192.168.0.1

We uses the similar commands in ADC006,

hostname ADC006
interface ethernet management
ip address 192.168.0.6 /24
ip default-gateway 192.168.0.1

Now we could use a USB port on laptop connect ADC005 console port and ethernet port on laptop connect ADC006 management port.
The next step is to build VRRP-A High Availability.
We trunked ethernet 5 and 6 together as vlan 99 dynamically and set both ethernet ports an active mode. A virtual ethernet port ve 99 for setting VLAN IP address is nessesary as well.
The same commands for both ADC devices. (the ve 99IP address should be different)

interface ethernet 5
enable
lacp trunk 1 mode actice
interface ethernet 6
enable
lacp trunk 1 mode actice
interface ve 99
ip address 1.1.1.1 /24
vlan 99
tagged trunk 1
router-interface ve 99

VRRP-A HA

Then we started to set VRRP-A.
Before enabling the function VRRP-A, set-id and device-id for each A10 3530 should be claimed. We set the set as 1, ADC005 as device 1 and ADC006 as device 2.
It is time to enable VRRP-A.

vrrp-a set-id 1
vrrp-a device-id 1
vrrp-a enable

The VRRP-A HA status changed from Standby to Active.

ADC005(config)#
ADC005-Standby(config)#    
ADC005-Active(config)#

For VRRP-A setting, we created a failover-non-preemption template. As the name saying, this template is for disable preempt when fail over.
The following commands are for ADC005. For ADC006，the commands are exactly the same except for setting priority as 50.

vrrp-a fail-over-policy-template failover-non-preemption
   trunk 1 weight 80
!
vrrp-a vrid default
   preempt-mode disable
   floating-ip 1.1.1.3
   priority 100
   fail-over-policy-template failover-non-preemption
!

Now we could find that the VRRP-A status of these two devices had became Active and Standby.

VCS

We used the virtual interface ve 99 as VCS transmit port. ADC005 was set as device 1 and ADC006 as device 2 The following commands are for ADC005. For ADC006，the commands are exactly the same except for setting priority as 100.

vcs floating-ip 2.2.2.2 /24
vcs device 1
priority 150
interfaces ve 99
enable
exit
vcs reload

After handshaking and synchronisation, VCS had been built up. Since we reloaded ADC006 VCS after ADC005, ADC005 became ADC005-Standby-vBlade[1/1] and ADC005, ADC006 became ADC005-Active-vMaster[1/2]. The VSC status and information could be read by command show vcs summary and show vcs stat. The following information was the current vcs summary on ADC006.

ADC006-Active-vMaster[1/2]#show vcs summary
VCS Chassis:
   VCS Enabled:                               Yes
   Chassis ID:                                1
   Floating IP:                               2.2.2.2
   Mask:                                      255.255.255.0
   Multicast IP:                              224.0.0.210
   Multicast Port:                            41217
   Version:                                   2.7.1-GR1.b58
Members(* means local device):
 ID  State       Priority IP:Port                                       Location
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1   vBlade      150      1.1.1.1:41216                                 Remote  
 2   vMaster(*)  100      1.1.1.2:41216                                 Local   
Total: 2

Upgrade System Version

Before upgrading system, the most important step is to check the current system version and back up system via management interface.

show version
backup system use-mgmt-port config ftp://x.x.x.x/

As the shown that the system version on both devices was version 2.7.1-GR1, build 58 (Apr-26-2015,07:23) and we would like to upgrade them to 4.1.4. We built a FTP server on laptop so that the A10 devices could download .upg system file from laptop via management interface.
The following sequence is important.

Disable VCS on the ADC005-Standby-vBlade[1/1] device.
Disable VCS on the ADC006-Active-vMaster[1/2] device.
Modified system boot sequence on ADC005-Active then save memory.
Upgrade ADC005-Active on hard disk secondary.
Modified system boot sequence on ADC006-Active then save memory.
Switch ADC006-Active to ADC006-ForcedStandby mode by command vrrp-a force-self-standby, then check VRRP-A by show vrrp-a.
Upgrade ADC006-ForcedStandby on hard disk secondary.
Disable ForcedStandby by no vrrp-a force-self-standby
Re-config VCS on ADC005-Active and ADC006-Standby.
Enable VCS on ADC005-Active.
Enable VCS on ADC006-Standby. (the vBlade one will reboot while VCS synchronising)

Check VCS configuration on both two devices.

vcs disable
show bootimage
bootimage hd sec
write memory
write memory secondary
upgrade hd sec use-mgmt-port ftp://x.x.x.x/ ACOS_non_FTA_4_1_4_332.64.upg
vcs enable
show vcs stat

Finally we got ACOS 4.1.4,

ADC006-Standby#show version
AX Series Advanced Traffic Manager AX3530
  Copyright 2007-2018 by A10 Networks, Inc.  All A10 Networks products are
  protected by one or more of the following US patents:
  9756071, 9742879, 9722918, 9712493, 9705800, 9661026, 9621575, 9609052
  9602442, 9596286, 9596134, 9584318, 9544364, 9537886, 9531846, 9497201
  9477563, 9398011, 9386088, 9356910, 9350744, 9344456, 9344421, 9338225
  9294503, 9294467, 9270774, 9270705, 9258332, 9253152, 9231915, 9219751
  9215275, 9154584, 9154577, 9124550, 9122853, 9118620, 9118618, 9106561
  9094364, 9060003, 9032502, 8977749, 8943577, 8918857, 8914871, 8904512
  8897154, 8868765, 8849938, 8826372, 8813180, 8782751, 8782221, 8595819
  8595791, 8595383, 8584199, 8464333, 8423676, 8387128, 8332925, 8312507
  8291487, 8266235, 8151322, 8079077, 7979585, 7804956, 7716378, 7665138
  7675854, 7647635, 7627672, 7596695, 7577833, 7552126, 7392241, 7236491
  7139267, 6748084, 6658114, 6535516, 6363075, 6324286, RE44701, 8392563
  8103770, 7831712, 7606912, 7346695, 7287084, 6970933, 6473802, 6374300
      64-bit Advanced Core OS (ACOS) version 4.1.4, build 332 (Mar-01-2018,12:37)
      Booted from Hard Disk secondary image
      Number of control CPUs is set to 1
      Serial Number: AX35C03016090005
      aFleX version: 2.0.0
      aXAPI version: 3.0
      Cylance version: N/A
      Hard Disk primary image version 2.7.1-GR1, build 58
      Hard Disk secondary image (default) version 4.1.4, build 332
      Compact Flash primary image (default) version 2.7.1-GR1, build 58

In former versions VCS does not need to re-config after upgrading. However, we found all VCS configurations disappeared in the experiment process. An engineer from A10 supplier gave us the demonstartion that VCS function in ACOS 4.1.4 has been a great improvement comparing with 2.7.1. In the process of upgrading, A10 device will drop former VCS configuration.
Experiment Tips

Remember always save memory and secondary memory when setting configurations.
```
write memory
write memory secondary
```
Remember always check settings by show commands.
```
show running-config
show interfaces brief
```