Manual Chapter : Prerequisites for BIG-IP Virtual Edition on Xen Project

Applies To:

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BIG-IP AAM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP APM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP Analytics

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP LTM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP AFM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP PEM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP DNS

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0

BIG-IP ASM

  • 13.0.1, 13.0.0
Manual Chapter

Host CPU requirements

The host hardware CPU must meet the following requirements.

  • The CPU must have 64-bit architecture.
  • The CPU must have virtualization support (AMD-V or Intel VT-x) enabled.
  • The CPU must support a one-to-one, thread-to-defined virtual CPU ratio, or on single-threading architectures, support at least one core per defined virtual CPU.
  • If your CPU supports the Advanced Encryption Standard New Instruction (AES-NI), SSL encryption processing on BIG-IP® VE will be faster. Contact your CPU vendor for details about which CPUs provide AES-NI support.

Host memory requirements

The number of licensed TMM cores determines how much memory the host system requires.

Number of cores Memory required
1 2 Gb
2 4 Gb
4 8 Gb
8 16 Gb

Configure SR-IOV on the hypervisor

To increase performance, you can enable Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). You need an SR-IOV-compatible network interface card (NIC) installed and the SR-IOV BIOS must be enabled.
See the Xen Project documentation for details.
To complete SR-IOV configuration, after you deploy BIG-IP® VE, you must add three PCI device NICs and map them to your networks.

Virtual machine memory requirements

The guest should have a minimum of 4 GB of RAM for the initial 2 virtual CPUs. For each additional CPU, you should add an additional 2 GB of RAM.

If you license additional modules, you should add memory.
Provisioned memory Supported modules Details
4 GB or fewer Two modules maximum. AAM can be provisioned as standalone only.
4-8 GB Three modules maximum.

BIG-IP® DNS does not count toward the module limit.

Exception: Application Acceleration Manager™ (AAM®) cannot be provisioned with any other module; AAM is standalone only.

8 GB Three modules maximum. BIG-IP DNS does not count toward the module-combination limit.
12 GB or more All modules. N/A
Important: To achieve licensing performance limits, all allocated memory must be reserved.

Virtual machine storage requirements

The BIG-IP® modules you want to use determine how much storage the guest needs.

Provisioned storage Supported modules Details
8 GB Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM®) module only; no space for LTM upgrades. You can increase storage if you need to upgrade LTM or provision additional modules.
38 GB LTM module only; space for installing LTM upgrades. You can increase storage if you decide to provision additional modules. You can also install another instance of LTM on a separate partition.
139 GB All modules and space for installing upgrades. The Application Acceleration Manager™ (AAM®) module requires 20 GB of additional storage dedicated to AAM. For information about configuring the Datastore volume, see Disk Management for Datastore on the AskF5™ Knowledge Base (http://support.f5.com) for details.

For production environments, virtual disks should be deployed Thick (allocated up front). Thin deployments are acceptable for lab environments.

Note: To change the disk size after deploying the BIG-IP system, see Increasing disk space for BIG-IP® VE.

Virtual machine network interfaces

When you deploy BIG-IP® VE, a specific number of virtual network interfaces (vNICs) are available.

For Xen Project, three virtual NICs are required, at a minimum. More NICs are required if the high availability option is configured.

Each virtual machine can have a maximum of 10 NICs. You can deploy these as either:

  • A management interface and 9 dataplane interfaces, or
  • A management interface, 8 dataplane interfaces, and an HA interface.