Applies To:
Show VersionsBIG-IQ Centralized Management
- 6.0.1, 6.0.0, 5.4.0, 5.3.0, 5.2.0
About VE KVM deployment
To deploy the BIG-IQ® Virtual Edition (VE) system on KVM, you perform these tasks:
- Verify the host machine requirements.
- Deploy a BIG-IQ® system as a virtual machine.
- Deploy a BIG-IP® system.
- After you have deployed the virtual machines, log in to the BIG-IQ VE system and run the Setup utility. Using the Setup utility, you perform basic network configuration tasks, such as assigning VLANs to interfaces.
- Configure secure communication between the BIG-IQ system and the BIG-IP device.
Host machine requirements and recommendations
To successfully deploy and run the BIG-IQ® VE system, the host system must satisfy minimum requirements.
The host system must include these elements:
- RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS with the KVM package. The BIG-IQ Virtual Edition and Supported Hypervisors Matrix, published on the AskF5™ web site, http://support.f5.com identifies the Linux versions that are supported.
- Virtual Machine Manager
- Connection to a common NTP source (this is especially important for each host in a redundant system configuration)
- Use a 64-bit architecture.
- Have support for virtualization (AMD-V or Intel VT-x) enabled.
- 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.
- Intel processors must be from the Core (or newer) workstation or server family of CPUs.
Deploying a BIG-IQ VE virtual machine
The first steps in deploying BIG-IQ® VE are to download the Zip file and then extract the .qcow2 file, and save it to the KVM server. Next, you configure the virtual machine using Virtual Machine Manager.
Power on the BIG-IQ VE virtual machine
There are two default accounts used for initial configuration and setup:
- The root account provides access locally, or using SSH, or using the F5 Configuration utility. The root account password is default.
- The admin account provides access through the web interface. The admin account password is admin.
You should change passwords for both accounts before bringing a system into production.
Accessing the BIG-IQ VE management user interface
If no IP address was assigned, you can assign one by using the BIG-IQConfiguration utility.
You can use a hypervisor generic statement, such as tmsh list sys management-ip to confirm that the management IP address has been properly assigned.