Lab 2.3 – Create Local Connector

Cloud Connectors in iWorkflow serve as the L1-3 Network and Device Onboarding automation component in the automation toolchain. iWorkflow supports Cloud Connectors for various vendor integrations (F5 vCMP, F5 BIG-IP, Cisco APIC, vmWare NSX, etc.) In this lab we will create a ‘BIG-IP Connector’ for the BIG-IP devices in the UDF deployment. This connector will then allow you to drive a fully automated deployment from the iWorkflow Service Catalog.

Task 1 – Create a Local Connector

In this task we will create a Local Connector that is linked to our BIG-IP devices. The Local Cloud Connector is DSC aware and will automatically detect that the BIG-IP devices are clustered and configure itself accordingly.

Perform the following steps to complete this task:

  1. Expand the “Lab 2.3 – Create Local Connector” folder in the Postman collection.

  2. Click the “Step 1: Create a Local Connector” item in the collection. We will create a new connector by performing a POST to the local connector collection. If you examine the JSON body you can see we are providing a reference to the URL for the BIG-IP-A device (using the UUID environment variable we populated earlier):

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  3. Click the ‘Send’ button to create the connector.

  4. Click the “Step 2: Get Local Connectors” item in the collection and click ‘Send’. Examine the output to see how the connector was configured. Take note of the reference to the ‘device-group’. This is how the connector determines the HA state of the underlying BIG-IP devices. Find the ‘connectorId’ of the connector and update your Postman environment to include the ‘connectorId’ as the value of the ‘iworkflow_connector_uuid’ variable:

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  5. Click the “Step 3: Assign Connector to Tenant” item in the collection. The iWorkflow device has been pre-configured with a tenant named ‘MyTenant’. This request will assign this connector to to the ‘MyTenant’ tenant allowing service deployments from that tenant. Click the ‘Send’ button and examine the response.