VMware ESXi: BIG-IP VE User’s Guide¶
Get help when working with BIG-IP VE in VMware ESXi.
Configure the CPU reservation¶
In VMware, based on selections you made when you deployed the OVA file, a specific amount of memory is reserved for the BIG-IP VE virtual machine.
CPU is not specifically reserved, so to prevent instability on heavily-loaded hosts, you should reserve it manually.
In vSphere, edit the properties of the virtual machine.
Click the Resources tab.
In the Settings area, click CPU.
In the Resource Allocation section, use the slider to change the reservation.
The CPU reservation can be up to 100 percent of the defined virtual machine hardware. For example, if the hypervisor has 2.0 GHz cores, and the VE is set to 4 cores, you will need 4 x 2.0 GHz reserved for 8GHz (or 8000 MHz).
Click OK.
Licensing BIG-IP VE¶
In order to use BIG-IP VE, you must have a license from F5.
To choose the license you need, see this webpage. You can get a trial license if you need one.
Reusing licenses¶
In BIG-IP VE version 12.1.3.3 and later, and 13.1.0.2 and later, 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 Revoke.
and clickFrom tmsh, to revoke the license, run the command:
tmsh revoke sys license
This functionality works for BIG-IP VE only.
Per-App licenses¶
When you want to use BIG-IP VE with one back-end application, choose a Per-App license.
Per-App licenses are currently available:
- As BYOL (Bring Your Own License)
- With throughput speeds of 25 or 200 Mbps
- In BIG-IP VE 13.1.0.2 and later
This license is available for Local Traffic Manager (LTM) only, or you can use it to run LTM and Application Security Manager (ASM) as a WAF (Web Application Firewall).
Per-App licenses are also used as part of BIG-IP Cloud Edition, to license BIG-IP VE instances when they are auto-scaled from within BIG-IQ.
Per-App licensing virtual server options¶
With a Per-App license, you can create one virtual IP address and three virtual servers.
The three virtual servers in this case would have the same destination IP address, but would use different ports.
For example, your virtual servers might be:
Name | Description | Destination Address/Service Port |
---|---|---|
VS1 | Website traffic | 10.10.10.10:443 |
VS2 | Redirect for website traffic | 10.10.10.10:80 |
VS3 | Website instrumentation/health checking | 10.10.10.10:8080 |
If you’d prefer, the virtual server can be a wildcard. For example, the Destination Address would be 0.0.0.0 instead of 10.10.10.10 in the previous example. You can specify the Service Port, or use *.
Name | Description | Destination Address/Service Port |
---|---|---|
VS1 | Catch-all, log with iRule | 0.0.0.0:* |
VS2 | Website traffic | 0.0.0.0:443 |
VS3 | Website instrumentation/health checking | 0.0.0.0:8080 |
Licenses for BIG-IP add-on modules¶
Some add-on modules for BIG-IP will require an add-on license. For complete details, consult the Activating add-on modules procedure in the K7752 article.
Configure 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.
Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE command line.
Log in as
root
.Type
tmsh
to open the tmsh utility.You will see
tmsh
at the prompt once the utility is opened.To determine whether TSO support is currently enabled, use the command:
show sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload
To enable support for TSO, use the command:
sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload enable
To disable support for TSO, use the command:
sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload disable
Turn 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.
Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE TMSH utility.
From the command line, log in as root.
Type
tmsh
to open the utility.Run the following commands, replacing
<X>
in each of the examples with the NIC number.To Use this command Turn off rx-checksumming. ethtool -K eth<X> rx off
Turn off LRO. ethtool -K eth<X> lro off
Turn off GRO. ethtool -K eth<X> gro off
Confirm that LRO and GRO are turned off by running this command:
ethtool -k eth<X>
.In the system response to your command, you should see this info:
generic-receive-offload: off large-receive-offload: off
If either of these responses is on, your attempt to turn them off was not successful.
Repeat this process for each of the NICs that the BIG-IP VE uses to pass traffic.
See the hypervisor documentation for more details.
Increase disk space for BIG-IP VE¶
You must increase disk space on most cloud platforms, if you want to provision multiple modules. For more information, refer to the following topics: Disk usage by the BIG-IP modules with application volumes, Getting Started with BIG-IP Virtual Edition, and Overview of BIG-IP VE image sizes. To increase the disk space for BIG-IP VE allowing for additional module provisioning, expand the following VE directory:
/appdata
Before proceeding with the following steps for expanding configuration disk space, use hypervisor tools to expand the disk size for the BIG-IP VE virtual machine and reboot.
Then 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 of the previous directories you want to resize, complete the following steps.
Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE tmsh utility.
From the command line, log in as root.
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
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).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
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.
See Also
Change the NIC used for BIG-IP VE management¶
By default, management traffic goes through the eth0
NIC and data traffic goes through the other available NICs.
If you need to use eth0
for data traffic, you can change the NIC that management traffic goes through.
- Use SSH to connect to BIG-IP VE.
- If you need to determine which NICs are available, stop TMM by typing
bigstart stop tmm
. Then typeip addr
to view the list of available NICs. - Change the management NIC by typing
tmsh modify sys db provision.managementeth value eth1
whereeth1
is the NIC you want to use for management. You can use any available NIC. - Press Enter.
- Reboot BIG-IP VE by typing
reboot
and then pressing Enter.
When BIG-IP VE is running again, you can use eth0
for data.
Note
If the subnet associated with the management NIC does not have DHCP, you must assign a new IP address by using the BIG-IP Configuration utility tool.
About single NIC and multi-NIC configurations¶
A typical BIG-IP VE configuration might include four NICs: one for management, one for internal, one for external, and one for high availability.
However, if you want to create a VM for a quick test, you can create a configuration with just one NIC. In this case, BIG-IP VE creates basic networking objects for you.
When BIG-IP VE first boots, it determines the number of active NICs. If BIG-IP VE detects one NIC, then:
- Networking objects (vNIC 1.0, a VLAN named Internal, and an associated self IP address) are created automatically for you.
- The port for the Configuration utility is moved from 443 to 8443.
- High availability (failover) is not supported, but config sync is.
- VLANs must have untagged interfaces.
If BIG-IP VE detects multiple NICs, then you create the networking objects. The port for the Configuration utility remains 443.
You can change the number of NICs after first boot and move from single to multi-NIC and vice versa.
Note
If there is no DHCP server in your environment and no IP address automatically assigned, then the networking objects will not be created and the port will not be moved.
About routes in a single NIC configuration¶
If you want to configure a static route that relies on a gateway in the same subnet as the self IP address, you must first disable the setting that enforces single NIC setup:
modify sys db provision.1nicautoconfig value disable
Confirm that the value is correct by typing:
list sys db provision.1nicautoconfig
The return value should be disable
.
If you do not change this value, any time you reboot BIG-IP VE, the manually-configured static route will cause validation errors during load sys config
.
Change from single NIC to multi-NIC¶
When you initially boot BIG-IP VE, if it recognized only one NIC, then some network configuration was done automatically. If you want to use more than one NIC, complete the following steps.
Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.
Return to the default configuration.
tmsh load sys config default
Save the changes.
tmsh save sys config
Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.
setdb provision.1nic enable
Reboot BIG-IP VE.
reboot
When the BIG-IP VE instance is up and running, multiple NICs will be recognized and you can begin configuring BIG-IP VE.
Change from multi-NIC to single NIC¶
If you have a BIG-IP VE configuration with multiple NICs, you can simplify the configuration to have only one NIC. When you boot the BIG-IP VE and only one NIC is recognized, some networking objects are created automatically for you.
Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.
Return to the default configuration of BIG-IP VE.
tmsh load sys config default
Save the changes.
tmsh save sys config
Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.
setdb provision.1nic forced_enable
Reboot BIG-IP VE.
reboot
When the BIG-IP VE instance is up and running, it will have a single NIC and related network objects will be created.
See Also