A short, high-impact 21-day contract for an experienced F5 engineer ready to own a full platform migration from legacy i5800 appliances to the rSeries r5600 platform. The engagement is due to commence at the end of August and is expected to be outside IR35.
Our client is migrating four F5 BIG-IP appliances across two data centres, transitioning vCMP guest configurations to F5OS tenants. The environment runs BIG-IP v17.1+ across HA pairs provisioned with LTM, DNS, APM, and ASM. This is a like-for-like migration with a clear scope, structured cutover windows, and a well-defined architecture. The equipment is procured and the project is ready for execution.
What You'll Own
End-to-end delivery across seven phases:
Planning & Preparation: Review the existing F5 configuration (including QKView analysis), identify migration risks, and produce the migration plan, runbook with rollback steps, and testing plan for stakeholder sign-off.
Platform Setup: Prepare UCS files, establish management access on the r5600 devices, activate F5 cloud licensing, upgrade F5OS, create BIG-IP tenants, and provision all modules. Import and adapt the base configuration offline to ensure zero production impact. Configure HA failover, SYSLOG/SNMP monitoring, and remote authentication (LDAP/AD/TACACS/RADIUS).
Component Testing: Execute cold testing, cold commissioning, and hot failover testing on each HA pair. Produce test evidence for customer witness sign-off.
Configuration Migration: Like-for-like migration of LTM, ASM, and APM configurations. Integrate new DNS BIG-IPs into the existing sync-group. Validate connectivity, pool member availability, application monitoring, and licensing.
Cutover: Lead two out-of-hours change windows (4 hours each, one per DC), including failover, verification, and post-cutover testing.
Post-Cutover Support: Up to 4 hours of next-business-day support after each cutover.
Knowledge Transfer: Deliver a 4-hour session covering operations, administration, backup/restore, and troubleshooting. Update the As-Built documentation to reflect the migrated deployment.
Requirements
Essential
Proven F5 BIG-IP migration experience, ideally iSeries to rSeries or equivalent hardware refresh
Strong working knowledge of F5OS: tenant creation, licensing, platform management
Hands-on experience with LTM, DNS (GTM), APM, and ASM
Experience migrating vCMP guest configurations to F5OS tenants
Solid understanding of HA failover configuration and testing
Ability to produce professional migration runbooks, rollback plans, and test documentation
Comfortable managing out-of-hours cutover windows independently
Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP/S, DNS, and routing Desirable
F5 certifications (F5-CA, F5-CTS, or F5 Certified Administrator)
Experience with F5 cloud-based licensing
Familiarity with QKView analysis and iHealth diagnostics
Scripting and automation: iRules, iControl, tmsh, Ansible, or similar
