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Release Note: BIG-IP Virtual Edition 11.3.0

Original Publication Date: 05/17/2013

Summary:

BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) is a version of the BIG-IP system that runs as a virtual machine. Supported modules include Local Traffic Manager, Global Traffic Manager, Application Security Manager, Access Policy Manager, WAN Optimization Manager, WebAccelerator, Edge Gateway, Policy Enforcement Manager, Application Firewall Manager, Analytics, and Protocol Security Manager. BIG-IP VE includes all features of device-based BIG-IP modules running on standard BIG-IP TMOS, except as noted in release notes and product documentation.

Note: The BIG-IP VE product license determines the maximum allowed throughput rate. To view this rate limit, you can display the licensing page within the BIG-IP Configuration utility.

Important: To run VE in version 11.x, the BIG-IP system must have 4 GB of memory. Beginning in 11.3.0, to provision for three modules, the BIG-IP system must have 6.5 GB.

Contents:

Summary VE 11.3.0

User documentation for this release

For a list of Virtual Edition (VE) hypervisor support, see the Virtual Edition and Supported Hypervisors Matrix.

For a comprehensive list of documentation that is relevant to this release, refer to the documentation page specific to the product you are using:

Behavior changes in 11.3.0

ID	Description
ID 391795	The 11.3.x Virtual Edition (VE) architecture is substantially different, featuring CMP and higher performance NICs with lower hypervisor overhead. Upgrade from VE version 11.2.x to 11.3.x is supported on VMware. Upgrade to 11.3.x is not supported on other hypervisors. In addition, downgrade from VE version 11.3.x to 11.2.x is not supported for any hypervisor.
ID 397975	The TMM can address more than 4GB of memory in BIG-IP Virtual Edition for this release of software.

Local Traffic Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

ID	Description
ID 403592	Platforms with less than 6.5G memory cannot be upgraded to 11.3 if three or more modules are provisioned. Note that upgrades from 10.0.x display only an "upgrade failed" message as a software status. All other versions show a clear error message, guiding the users to SOL13988. Before upgrading, make sure you have only one or two modules provisioned if the BIG-IP system has less than 6.5G of memory.
ID 224507	When VE is deployed on VMware, the management port might not correctly reflect the uplink port speed of the vSwitch that it is connected to. This should have no adverse affects on actual management port traffic.
ID 346083	"When you remove an interface from all VLANs, and then add the same interface without saving in the interim, the interface status remains UNINITIALIZED, and you can only access the system from the console. To recover, manually edit bigip_base.conf, deleting the entries and running the command: 'load sys config'. An entry appears similar to the following: net interface 1.3 { media-fixed 10000T-FD }"
ID 351199	When importing an OVA into XenServer, CPU priority is not set. It is recommended that a higher priority be set on the VM. Using XenCenter, click on the General tab of the VM. Then click Properties. On the CPU and Memory tab, the VCPU priority should be configured at the highest value.
ID 351367	"XenCenter OVF wizard's Run Operating System Fixups option blocks appliance import (ID 351367) When importing the OVA into XenCenter, make sure Run Operating System Fixups is unchecked."
ID 351538	"F5 Networks strongly recommends that the host system use CPUs with AMD-V or Intel-VT technology. This might require adjusting the systems BIOS or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) configuration. For specific hypervisors, hardware assisted virtualization technologies might be required in order to boot BIG-IP VE. For detailed system requirements, see the hypervisor's documentation."
ID 352456	Host-based time synchronization can last a few minutes in order to align the clocks.
ID 352856	"If an SCF is migrated between BIG-IP VE running on non-similar hypervisor software, a validation error may prevent configuration loading. Loading the configuration ... BIGpipe interface creation error: 01070318:3: ""The requested media for interface 1.1 is invalid."" When this condition is encountered on BIG-IP Virtual Edition, configuration may be fixed for import by removing the entire line that contains ""media fixed"" statements for each interface."
ID 358355	When deployed as a Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine, BIG-IP VE must be configured with Static Memory Allocation. The use of Dynamic Memory Allocation is unsupported and might cause issues.
ID 364704	Taking a snapshot of the virtual machine's memory often pauses the virtual machine and may produce undesired results. To correct this problem on VMware hypervisors, do not include the virtual machine's memory when snapshots are taken.
ID 366403	After modifying the BIG-IP system configuration by adding or removing Network Interfaces, the interface numbering might appear out of order and NICs may appear that are no longer present. If the virtual interfaces on the BIG-IP VE system are changed after a binary MCPD database has been created, the system may not detect the change even after a subsequent reboot. To ensure that the system properly detects the new or removed interfaces, type the command "rm /var/db/mcpd*" at the BIG-IP VE command prompt, and reboot the system. TMM-to-vSwitch interface mapping can be viewed by comparing the MAC addresses of the interfaces displayed in the BIG-IP Configuration utility to those displayed in the hypervisors configuration. The interfaces may need a simple adjustment to map to the correct networks.
ID 367759	Modifying an interface's VLAN configuration from tagged to untagged, or untagged to tagged, can result in unavailability of traffic on that interface. Restarting the tmm with "bigstart restart tmm" will correct this condition.
ID 367862	Network Interface Port Mirroring is not supported by BIG-IP VE with this release.
ID 370367	On BIG-IP VE only, changing the interface used by a VLAN from one to another might show degraded performance in the event that both interfaces are configured to participate on the same broadcast network. Restarting the TMM with "bigstart restart tmm" will restore performance and resolve the issue.
ID 371458	On a XenServer Host, all interfaces are expected to show up as 100TX-FD within tmsh. All application traffic handling interfaces will be shown with a media speed of 100 and an Active Duplex of half in the GUI for this release. This speed rating is simply cosmetic and not actually reflective of the speeds and duplex for BIG-IP VE on a XenServer host. The actual link is a high speed internal connection via a Virtual Network Interface within the hypervisor at speeds greater than 100Mbps.
ID 371631	The tmsh command "show net interface all-properties" will not specify the media on the data plane in BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The command "list net interface" displays media information and may be used instead.
ID 372540	Migration of BIG-IP VE, whether live or powered off, will commonly incur an innocuous warning message similar to this on vSphere hypervisors: Virtual Ethernet card 'Network adapter 1' is not supported. This is not a limitation of the host in general, but of the virtual machine's configured guest OS on the selected host." This message is benign and can safely be ignored.
ID 374064	Import verification of the .ova may fail when using the XenCenter 5.6. OVA import wizard. It is suggested that XenCenter 5.6 users verify the .ova file signature as described on AskF5.
ID 388118	For IPv6 to work on KVM using a macvtap interface, the IFF_ALLMULTI setting must interface> allmulti".
ID 390961	Only Virtio NICs must be used for traffic and management.
ID 394817	"VADC now supports CMP (that is, multiple TMMs running on the same box). For a rate limited license, the limit is divided by the number of TMMs, so each TMM is capped at a fraction of the total licensed limit. For example, if a 200M license with one connection has a throughput of 180Mbits/s before enabling CMP, then for two TMMs the expected throughput would be 90 Mbits/s, and with four TMMs, the expected throughput would be 45 Mbit/s."
ID 399035	"The following message may be logged on each boot with this release of BIG-IP Virtual Edition: ""SRAT: PXMs only cover 61231MB of your 61999MB e820 RAM. Not used. SRAT: SRAT not used."" This message is benign and can safely be ignored."
ID 399046	On boot of BIG-IP Virtual Edition on Xen Hypervisors, a message similar to "err kernel: piix4_smbus 0000:00:01.3: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr" may be displayed. This is considered innocuous and may be ignored.
ID 404628	BIG-IP Virtual Edition hosted on XenServer cannot have more than five network interfaces configured in the virtual machine definition for this release of software.
ID 406748	vCMP guests running an earlier version of software may be unable to upgrade to v11.3 using the Software Management screens in the Configuration utility. If you encounter this upgrade failure, you have two choices: A) First upgrade to a v11.1 or v11.2 hotfix rollup where this bug is resolved (Hotfix-BIGIP-11.1.0-2438.0-HF6 (or later), Hotfix-BIGIP-11.2.0-2747.0-HF4 (or later), Hotfix-BIGIP-11.2.1-1042.0-HF3 (or later)). Then retry the v11.3.0 installation. B) Get an IM patch file for this problem from F5 Support, and apply it. The patch archive file name is 'patch.406748.im'. To apply it: 1 - copy the file to the TMOS filesystem. 2 - in a shell, run the command "im patch.406748.im". 3 - retry the v11.3.0 installation.

Global Traffic Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Global Traffic Manager-Virtual Edition.

Application Security Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Application Security Manager-Virtual Edition.

Access Policy Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Access Policy Manager-Virtual Edition.

WAN Optimization Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

Bug	Description
ID 359815	Dashboard can show random WAN optimization throughput spikes as approximately two times the actual bandwidth.

WebAccelerator-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to WebAccelerator-Virtual Edition.

Edge Gateway-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Edge Gateway-Virtual Edition.

Policy Enforcement Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Policy Enforcement Manager-Virtual Edition.

Application Firewall Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Application Firewall Manager-Virtual Edition.

Analytics-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Analytics-Virtual Edition.

Protocol Security Manager-Virtual Edition known issues

There are no known issues specific to Protocol Security Manager-Virtual Edition.

Contacting F5 Networks

Phone:	(206) 272-6888
Fax:	(206) 272-6802
Web:	http://support.f5.com
Email:	support@f5.com

For additional information, please visit http://www.f5.com.

Additional resources

You can find additional support resources and technical documentation through a variety of sources.

The F5 Networks Technical Support web site: http://www.f5.com/support/
The AskF5 web site: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us.html
The F5 DevCentral web site: http://devcentral.f5.com/
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