- bigip VE is a bigip running as a virtual machine on top of an hypervisor. it's like an appliance on a software (TMOS) point of view. Only difference are in networking components managed by hypervisor.
- so you are right in order to test your prod irules, you need at least to have a config close to your prod, with backend server and clients as well. the configuration aspect could be minimized as you can copy and past part of your configuration from prod to ve.
- you can use snapshots to copy multiple VE, but you will have to relicense them, and change mgt IP addresses.
- license is tied to the VM (uuid for Vmware for example).
- versioning is still not present in irules.
Our management solution called bigiq could help you by provisioning (spinning) VEs and use licensing pools.
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