Last updated on: 2023-11-21 09:59:28.

VMware ESXi: BIG-IP VE User’s Guide

Version notice:

This content applies to BIG-IP VE 14.0.0 and later

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.

  1. In vSphere, edit the properties of the virtual machine.

  2. Click the Resources tab.

  3. In the Settings area, click CPU.

  4. 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).

  5. 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.

To learn how to license a BIG-IP, consult the K7752 article.

Reusing licenses

In BIG-IP VE version 12.1.3.3+, and 13.1.0.2+ ONLY, 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 System -> License and click Revoke.

  • From tmsh, to revoke the license, run the command:

    tmsh revoke sys license

This functionality works for these BIG-IP VE versions 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, you can have the following virtual servers:

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.

  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE command line.

  2. Log in as root.

  3. Type tmsh to open the tmsh utility.

    You will see tmsh at the prompt once the utility is opened.

  4. To determine whether TSO support is currently enabled, use the command:

    show sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload

  5. To enable support for TSO, use the command:

    sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload enable

  6. To disable support for TSO, use the command:

    sys db tm.tcpsegmentationoffload disable

Turn off LRO or GRO

Although there are multiple ways to turn off LRO, the most reliable way is to connect to the virtual machine and use the ethtool utility.

  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE TMSH utility.

  2. From the command line, log in as root.

  3. Type tmsh to open the utility.

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  6. 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 and hypervisor 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
  1. Plan for your disk space requirements.
  2. Extend your disk space for provisioning multiple modules.

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.

  1. Use an SSH tool to access the BIG-IP VE tmsh utility.

  2. From the command line, log in as root.

  3. 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

  4. 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).

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  1. Use SSH to connect to BIG-IP VE.
  2. If you need to determine which NICs are available, stop TMM by typing bigstart stop tmm. Then type ip addr to view the list of available NICs.
  3. Change the management NIC by typing tmsh modify sys db provision.managementeth value eth1 where eth1 is the NIC you want to use for management. You can use any available NIC.
  4. Press Enter.
  5. 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 lacks 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 can 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.

    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. As an example, do the following, which uses the same IP address 192.168.80.53/24 for management and self IP:

    1. Disable DHCP and enable setting a static address, tmsh modify sys global-settings mgmt-dhcp disabled. See this routes topic for more information.
    2. Disable single NIC auto-config, tmsh modify sys db provision.1nicautoconfig value disable. See this KVM topic for BIG-IP VE 13.1.X for more information.
    3. Ensure management route will persist, tmsh modify sys db provision.1nic value forced_enable.
    4. Move management port, tmsh modify sys httpd ssl-port 8443. See this K31003634 article for more information.
    5. Add TCP port to the default port lockdown protocols and services, tmsh modify net self-allow defaults add { tcp:8443 }.
    6. Configure static management IP address, tmsh create sys management-ip 192.168.80.53/24 description 'provisioned by tmos_static_mgmt'
    7. Create and attach internal VLAN to interface 1.0, tmsh create net vlan internal { interfaces replace-all-with { 1.0 { } } tag 4094 mtu 1450 }. Be aware that this configuration my already exist and can produce the following error: “The requested VLAN (/Common/internal) already exists in partition Common.”
    8. Create self IP, assign the same IP as the management IP, and assign internal VLAN to default port lockdown policy, tmsh create net self self_1nic { address 192.168.80.53/24 allow-service default vlan internal }.
    9. Create management route gateway, tmsh create sys management-route default gateway 192.168.80.1.
    10. Define the TMM default route, tmsh create net route default network default gw 192.168.80.1.
    11. Save the configuration, tmsh save sys config base.

  • High availability (failover) is not supported, but config sync is supported.

  • VLANs must have untagged interface.

If BIG-IP VE detects multiple NICs, then you create the networking objects manually:

  • 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.
  • VLANs can have tagged interfaces.

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.

  1. Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.

  2. Return to the default configuration.

    tmsh load sys config default

  3. Save the changes.

    tmsh save sys config

  4. Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.

    setdb provision.1nic enable

  5. Reboot BIG-IP VE.

    reboot

  6. 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.

  1. Use an SSH tool to connect to BIG-IP VE.

  2. Return to the default configuration of BIG-IP VE.

    tmsh load sys config default

  3. Save the changes.

    tmsh save sys config

  4. Set a database variable so that the number of NICs will be recognized on reboot.

    setdb provision.1nic forced_enable

  5. 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