I am migrating from an End Of Life hardware to a new vCMP Guest and with the migration I am deploying all the applications using JSON and AS3 (through BIGiQ).

So we would like all the applications to be staged on the F5 in a disabled state and as we migrate each application with the team on the phone for verification, I just want to make the change in JSON and push to the F5 and disable the Virtual Server on the legacy EoL box and BOOM, live traffic on new box.

Why disabled state?  I don't want any traffic to go to new hardware until we are ready to migrate the application.

So in JSON format all I can figure out looking through the AS3 schema is possibly changing this one setting from true to false.  What it does is create everything but the virtual server if you go to the F5 itself.  So the partition is created (tenant) and you'll find the pool but you won't see any virtual server.

The goal is actually to have the virtual server deployed to the F5 using JSON but it be visible and disabled.

I "thought" if the virtual server was in a disabled state then it would not be responsive but this actually isn't true as I will demonstrate below

So I first remove the virtual server so we start with a clean slate

Now let's go to the command prompt on the F5 and ping the IP address of the Virtual Server (in this case its 192.168.199.22)

[root@usfnt2slbco02:/S2-green-P::Active:In Sync] config # ping 192.168.199.22
PING 192.168.199.22 (192.168.199.22) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- 192.168.199.22 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 4000ms

From above ping nothing is responding to that IP address.

Now let's deploy the Virtual Server in enabled state as shown above

Now we get a ping response as we should

[root@usfnt2slbco02:/S2-green-P::Active:In Sync] config # ping 192.168.199.22
PING 192.168.199.22 (192.168.199.22) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.109 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0.226 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=0.311 ms
^C
--- 192.168.199.22 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.109/0.215/0.311/0.083 ms

Now click on the checkbox to the left and click disable so the screen looks like this

So most people's thought is if its disabled then it shouldn't be responding, but it does

[root@usfnt2slbco02:/S2-green-P::Active:In Sync] config # ping 192.168.199.22
PING 192.168.199.22 (192.168.199.22) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.201 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0.242 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=0.232 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.199.22: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=0.259 ms
^C
--- 192.168.199.22 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.201/0.233/0.259/0.026 ms

The solution is to change that setting in the AS3 from

to

Then save and deploy and your virtual server will be gone and its no longer pingable