Setup guide

What is BIG-IP Virtual Edition?

BIG-IP

Virtual Edition (VE) is a version of the BIG-IP system that runs as a virtual machine (VM) in

specically-supported hypervisors (VMware ESX

or ESXi

for this guide). BIG-IP VE emulates a

hardware-based BIG-IP system running a VE-compatible version of BIG-IP

software.

Note: The BIG-IP VE product license determines the maximum allowed throughput rate. To view this rate

limit, you can display the BIG-IP VE licensing page within the BIG-IP Conguration utility. Lab editions

have no guarantee of throughput rate and are not supported for production environments.

BIG-IP Virtual Edition compatibility with VMware hypervisor products

BIG-IP

Virtual Edition (VE) is compatible with VMware ESX

4.0 and 4.1, and VMware ESXi

4.0 and

4.1 update 1 hosts.

Important: BIG-IP

Virtual Edition (VE) does not support hypervisors other than those identied in this

guide, and installation attempts on these platforms might be unsuccessful.

Hypervisor guest definition

The VMware virtual machine guest environment for the BIG-IP

VE, at minimum, must include the

following:

• 2 x virtual CPUs (reserve 2 GHz)

• 4 GB RAM with a 2-core CPU

• 8 GB RAM with a 4-core CPU

• 2 GB RAM with 2-core CPU (upgrade path from version 10.2.x)

• 1 x virtual Flexible (PCnet32 LANCE) network adapter (for management)

• 3 x virtual VMXNET3 network adapters

• 1 x 100 GB SCSI disk, by default

• 1 x 50 GB SCSI disk, as an extra disk option

A secondary disk is recommended and might be required for certain BIG-IP

modules.

When upgrading from version 10.2.x, change the conguration to at least 4 GB of RAM.

Important: Not supplying at least the minimum virtual conguration limits will produce unexpected results.

For production licenses, F5 Networks suggests using the maximum conguration limits for the BIG-IP

VE system. Reservations can be less for lab editions.

There are also some maximum conguration limits to consider for deploying a BIG-IP VE virtual machine,

such as:

• CPU reservation can be up to 100 percent of the dened virtual machine hardware. For example, if the

hypervisor has a 3 GHz core speed, the reservation of a virtual machine with 2 CPUs can be only 6 GHz

or less.

• RAM reservation can be only 2, 4, or 8 GB.

• For production environments, virtual disks should be deployed Thick (allocated up front). Thin

deployments are acceptable for lab environments.

Getting Started with BIG-IP Virtual Edition