Manual Chapter : Getting Started with BIG-IQ Virtual Edition

Applies To:

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BIG-IQ Centralized Management

  • 5.1.0, 5.0.0
Manual Chapter

What is BIG-IQ Virtual Edition?

BIG-IQ® Virtual Edition (VE) is a version of the BIG-IQ system that runs as a virtual machine in specifically-supported hypervisors. BIG-IQ VE emulates a hardware-based BIG-IQ system running a VE-compatible version of BIG-IQ software.

About BIG-IQ VE compatibility with XenServer hypervisor products

Each time there is a new release of BIG-IQ® Virtual Edition (VE) software, it includes support for additional hypervisor management products. The Virtual Edition and Supported Hypervisors Matrix on the AskF5™ website, http://support.f5.com, details which hypervisors are supported for each release.

Important: Hypervisors other than those identified in this guide are not supported with this BIG-IQ version; any installation attempts on unsupported platforms might not be successful.

About the hypervisor guest definition requirements

The XenServer virtual machine guest environment for the BIG-IQ® Virtual Edition (VE), at minimum, must include:

  • 2 x virtual CPUs
  • 4 GB RAM
    Important: When you provision the amount of RAM allocated to the virtual machine, it must match the amount of reserve RAM.
  • 1 x virtual network adapter
  • 1 x 95 GB disk
Important: Not supplying at least the minimum virtual configuration limits will produce unexpected results.
Important: Although you can successfully deploy BIG-IQ software with as few as 2 CPUs and 4 GB RAM, this configuration should only be used for evaluation purposes. For production use, F5 Networks recommends either 4 CPUs and 16 GB RAM, or (for higher performance) 8 CPUs and 32 GB RAM.

There are also some maximum configuration limits to consider for deploying a BIG-IQ VE virtual machine, such as:

  • 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.
  • To achieve optimum performance limits, all allocated RAM must be reserved and virtual disks should be deployed Thick (allocated up front).