F5 Logo MyF5
Search
  1. MyF5 Home
  2. Knowledge Centers
  3. BIG-IP LTM
  4. BIG-IP Virtual Edition 12.1.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V: Setup
  5. After Deploying BIG-IP VE on Hyper-V
Manual Chapter : After Deploying BIG-IP VE on Hyper-V

Applies To:

Show Versions Show Versions

BIG-IP AAM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP APM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP Analytics

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender

  • 12.1.0

BIG-IP LTM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP AFM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP PEM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP DNS

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0

BIG-IP ASM

  • 12.1.4, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.1.0
Manual Chapter
Table of Contents | << Previous Chapter | Next Chapter >>

About licensing BIG-IP VE

In order to use BIG-IP VE, you must have a license from F5. In the 12.x versions of BIG-IP, starting with BIG-IP VE version 12.1.3.1, you can revoke the license from a virtual machine and re-use it on another virtual machine.

From the Configuration utility, to revoke the license, go to System > License and click Revoke.

From tmsh, to revoke the license, run the command tmsh revoke sys license.

This functionality works for BIG-IP VE Bring Your Own License (BYOL) only.

Requirements and recommendations for optimum Hyper-V throughput

You can increase throughput of BIG-IP® VE on Hyper-V by following the recommendations described here. F5® has certified throughput with these recommendations; however, they are not required for 1Gbps performance.

Host system recommendations

Optimum settings for the host system include:

  • An Intel X520 network interface card (NICs) with two ports, one for the external and one for the internal interface. The NIC used for the management and/or HA interfaces can be a 1G card. For configurations that include an HA VLAN, the virtual switch can either share the NIC used by the management VLAN or use its own NIC.
  • Each NIC requires a virtual switch.
  • If your are using the Intel X520 NIC, the NIC drivers must be upgraded to a version at least as recent as version 3.8.35.0 NDIS 6.30.
  • The driver properties for the 10G NICs must be modified to disable Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and Interrupt Moderation. (You can use either the Hyper-V Manager graphic user interface or the PowerShell command line interface to perform this modification.)

Hypervisor recommendations

Optimum settings for the Hyper-V Manager include:

  • Disable Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) spanning.
  • Disable Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) for the VE. You should do this even if you've already disabled VMQ for the hypervisor, but especially if you chose not to disable VMQ for the hypervisor NICs.
  • Increase the number of licensed TMM cores to 8 and the amount of memory to 16 Gb.

BIG-IP VE considerations

You may also increase your VE performance by reducing the interrupt coalescing threshold for the BIG-IP VE. You can use the following tmsh command: 
tmsh modify sys db scheduler.unicasleeprxlimit.ltm value 16
.

Increasing disk space for BIG-IP VE

Before proceeding with these steps, use Hyper-V Manager to expand the disk size for the BIG-IP® VE virtual machine and reboot.
Use the BIG-IP VE tmsh utility to increase the amount of disk space used by the four BIG-IP VE directories:
  • /config
  • /shared
  • /var
  • /var/log
Note: At the time of this release, decreasing the VE disk size is not supported.

For each directory you want to resize, complete these steps.

  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE tmsh utility.
  2. From the command line, log in as root.
  3. List the current size of the directories on your disk so you can determine which ones need to be resized.
    tmsh show sys disk directory
  4. Expand the size of the directories in which you need additional space.
    tmsh modify sys disk directory <directory name> new-size <new directory size in 1KB blocks>
    For example, use tmsh modify sys disk directory /config new-size 3145740 to increase the size of /config directory to 3145740 1KB blocks (or roughly 3,221,237,760 bytes).
  5. To confirm that the command you just submitted is properly scheduled, you can show the new list of directories again.
    tmsh show sys disk directory
  6. If you change your mind about a submitted size change, you can revoke the size change.
    tmsh modify sys disk directory /config new-size 0
    In this example, the size of the /config directory is left as is, revoking any scheduled size changes.
    After you submit this sequence of tmsh commands, the directory size changes will be scheduled to occur the next time the BIG-IP VE virtual machine (VM) is rebooted.
The next time the VM running BIG-IP VE reboots, the changes are applied.
Table of Contents | << Previous Chapter | Next Chapter >>
Contact Support Contact Support

Have a Question?

Support and Sales >

About F5

Education

F5 Sites

Support Tasks




©2023 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.


Trademarks Policies Privacy California Privacy Do Not Sell My Personal Information