Manual Chapter : Getting Started with BIG-IQ Virtual Edition

Applies To:

Show Versions Show Versions

BIG-IQ Cloud

  • 4.4.0, 4.3.0

BIG-IQ Device

  • 4.4.0, 4.3.0

BIG-IQ Security

  • 4.4.0, 4.3.0
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 Hyper-V hypervisor products

Each time there is a new release of BIG-IP® 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 the matrix 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 Hyper-V virtual machine guest environment for the BIG-IQ® Virtual Edition (VE), at minimum, must include:

  • 2 x virtual CPUs
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 3 x virtual network adapters
  • 1 x 55 GB disk
Important: Not supplying at least the minimum virtual configuration limits will produce unexpected results.

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).