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  5. After Deploying BIG-IP VE on Hyper-V
Manual Chapter : After Deploying BIG-IP VE on Hyper-V

Applies To:

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BIG-IP AAM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP APM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP Analytics

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP LTM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP AFM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP PEM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP DNS

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0

BIG-IP ASM

  • 13.1.1, 13.1.0
Manual Chapter
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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
.

About licensing BIG-IP VE

In order to use BIG-IP VE, you must have a license from F5. Starting with BIG-IP VE version 13.1, 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 BYOL only.

Increase 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.

Change the NIC used for BIG-IP VE management

By default, management traffic goes through the eth0 NIC and data traffic goes through the other available NICs. If you need to use eth0 for data traffic, you can change the NIC that management traffic goes through.
  1. Use SSH to connect to BIG-IP VE.
  2. If you need to determine which NICs are available, stop TMM by typing bigstart stop tmm. Then type ip addr to view the list of available NICs.
  3. Change the management NIC by typing tmsh modify sys db provision.managementeth value eth1 where eth1 is the NIC you want to use for management. You can use any available NIC.
  4. Press Enter.
  5. Reboot BIG-IP VE by typing reboot and pressing Enter.
When BIG-IP VE is running again, you can use eth0 for data.
Note: If the subnet associated with the management NIC does not have DHCP, you must assign a new IP address by using the BIG-IP Configuration utility tool.

About routes in a single NIC configuration

If you want to configure a static route that relies on a gateway in the same subnet as the self IP address, you must first disable the setting that enforces single NIC setup:

modify sys db provision.1nicautoconfig value disable

Confirm that the value is correct by typing list sys db provision.1nicautoconfig.

The return value should be disable.

If you do not change this value, any time you reboot BIG-IP VE, the manually-configured static route will cause validation errors during load sys config.

Change from single NIC to multi-NIC

When you initially boot BIG-IP VE, if it recognized only one NIC, then some network configuration was done automatically. If you want to use more than one NIC, complete the following steps.
  1. Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.
  2. Return to the default configuration.
    tmsh load sys config default
  3. Save the changes.
    tmsh save sys config
  4. Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.
    setdb provision.1nic enable
  5. Reboot BIG-IP VE.
    reboot
When the BIG-IP VE instance is up and running, multiple NICs will be recognized and you can begin configuring BIG-IP VE.

Change from multi-NIC to single NIC

If you have a BIG-IP VE configuration with multiple NICs, you can simplify the configuration to have only one NIC. When you boot the BIG-IP VE and only one NIC is recognized, some networking objects are created automatically for you.
  1. Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.
  2. Return to the default configuration of BIG-IP VE.
    tmsh load sys config default
  3. Save the changes.
    tmsh save sys config
  4. Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.
    setdb provision.1nic forced_enable
  5. Reboot BIG-IP VE.
    reboot
When the BIG-IP VE instance is up and running, it will have a single NIC and related network objects will be created.
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