BIG-IQ VE is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 and CentOS 6.3 with their KVM package.

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

• 2 x virtual CPUs (up to 9 are supported)
• 4 GB RAM
• 2 x virtual network adapters (minimum); more if configured with the high availability option
  Important: The number of virtual network adapters per virtual machine definition is determined by the hypervisor.
• 1 x 100 GB IDE disk

For production licenses, F5 Networks suggests using the maximum configuration limits for the BIG-IQ VE system. Reservations can be less for lab editions. For each virtual machine, the KVM virtual machine guest environment permits a maximum of 8 network adapters or 1 legacy virtual Network Adapter as a management port and 8 network adapters as dataplane ports. The Legacy Network Adapter is not supported for the dataplane. For peak performance, F5 recommends using only network adapters.

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 licensing performance limits, all allocated RAM must be reserved.
• For production environments, virtual disks should be deployed Thick (allocated up front). Thin deployments are acceptable for lab environments.