BIG IP F5 LTM Tutorial - Part 6

3. BIG IP CLI Utility                     

Ø  BIG IP F5 Command Line Utility & Tools :-

•  Bigpipe Shell Utility  : Type “Bigpipe shell”  & hit enter for this utility {Prompt : bp>}
•  Config utility             : Type “config” {Initial Config Tool}
•  Bigtop utility             : Type “bigtop” {Display real time traffic}
•  Bigstart utility           : Type “bigstart” {Start, Stop, Restart various daemons}
•  TCL                        : iRules {Tool Command Language}
• Shell CLI Mode       : Type “tmsh” {Traffic Management Shell – Prompt  (tmos)# }

Ø  The BIG-IP system includes a tool known as the Traffic Management Shell (tmsh) that you can use to configure and manage the system from the command line.

Ø  “tmsh” is an interactive shell that you can use to manage the BIG-IP system. The structure of tmsh is hierarchical and modular as shown below. The highest level is the root module, which contains six subordinate modules: auth, cli, gtm, ltm, net, and sys.

Ø  Important things to remember when examining commands in TMSH:

• “Show” (usually) provides just the statistical information, with configuration parameters present to provide a level of disambiguation.
•  “List” provides actual configuration information, but just variations from the default. For example, “list /ltm virtual TEST will show you the configuration.
• “all-properties” extends a “list” command to show every configuration option, not just the variations from default.
• “Help” command is very useful if you are not familiar with CLI mode of TMSH. To use “HELP” command just uses the same structure mention above. For Example: “help ltm pool” this will show you all detail CLI syntax, description, configuration example & related options with their descriptions.
• “Save” command is used to save the running configuration.
• “Delete” command is used to delete the configuration

As per BIG IP F5:

    

“Show”                 :  View runtime information, statistics and status

“List”                     :  View configuration and settings

When I tested above command & there output then I found that “List” & “Show” command will give you almost identical output, so you can use both command which ever you want & found easy to use.

Note: Bigpipe Mapping with tmsh command: https://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/tmsh.BigpipeMappings.ashx