Manual Chapter : After Deploying BIG-IP VE on ESXi

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

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.

Configuring the CPU reservation

Based on selections you made when you deployed the OVA file, a specific amount of memory is reserved for the BIG-IP VE virtual machine.

CPU is not specifically reserved, so to prevent instability on heavily-loaded hosts, you should reserve it manually.

  1. In vSphere, edit the properties of the virtual machine.
  2. Click the Resources tab.
  3. In the Settings area, click CPU.
  4. In the Resource Allocation section, use the slider to change the reservation.
    The CPU reservation can be up to 100 percent of the defined 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.
  5. Click OK.

Configuring TSO support

The TCP Segmentation Offloading (TSO) feature, which includes support for large receive offload (LRO) and Jumbo Frames, is enabled by default.
Note: You must have the admin user role to enable or disable TSO support.
  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP® VE command line.
  2. Log in as root.
  3. Type tmsh to open the tmsh utility.
    You will see tmsh at the prompt once the utility is opened.
  4. To determine whether TSO support is currently enabled, use the command:
    show sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload
  5. To enable support for TSO, use the command:
    sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload enable
  6. To disable support for TSO, use the command:
    sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload disable

Turning off LRO or GRO

Although there are a number of ways to turn off LRO, the most reliable way is to connect to the virtual machine and use the ethtool utility.
  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP® VE TMSH utility.
  2. From the command line, log in as root.
  3. Type tmsh to open the utility.
  4. Run the following commands, replacing <X> in each of the examples with the NIC number.
    To Use this command
    Turn off rx-checksumming. ethtool -K eth<X> rx off
    Turn off LRO. ethtool -K eth<X> lro off
    Turn off GRO. ethtool -K eth<X> gro off
  5. Confirm that LRO and GRO are turned off by running this command: ethtool -k eth<X>.
    In the system response to your command, you should see this info:
    generic-receive-offload: off
    large-receive-offload: off

    If either of these responses is on, your attempt to turn them off was not successful.

  6. Repeat this process for each of the NICs that the BIG-IP VE uses to pass traffic.
See the ESXi documentation for more details.

Increasing disk space for BIG-IP VE

Before proceeding with these steps, use vSphere 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.