Manual Chapter : After Deploying BIG-IP VE on KVM

Applies To:

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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 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.
See the KVM documentation for more details.

Increasing disk space for BIG-IP VE

Before proceeding with these steps, use Virt 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.