Applies To:
Show VersionsBIG-IQ Cloud
- 4.2.0
BIG-IQ Device
- 4.2.0
BIG-IQ Security
- 4.2.0
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 VMware hypervisor products
BIG-IQ Virtual Edition (VE) is compatible with VMware ESX 4.0 and 4.1, and VMware ESXi 4.0, 4.1 update 1, and 5.0 hosts.
About the hypervisor guest definition requirements
The VMware virtual machine guest environment for the BIG-IQ Virtual Edition (VE), at minimum, must include:
- 2 x virtual CPUs
- 4 GB RAM
- 1 x VMXNET3 virtual network adapter or Flexible virtual network adapter (for management)
- 1 x virtual VMXNET3 virtual network adapter (three are configured in the default deployment for dataplane network access)
- 1 x 100 GB SCSI disk, by default
- 1 x 50 GB SCSI optional secondary disk, which might be required as a datastore for specific BIG-IP modules. For information about datastore requirements, refer to the BIG-IP module's documentation.
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 VMware virtual machine guest environment permits a maximum of 10 virtual network adapters (either 10 VMXNET3 with 1 management + 9 dataplane or 1 Flexible management + 9 VMXNET3 dataplane).
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.