Welcome to the BIG-IP LTM VE forums

I finally had a chance to check this out this weekend and thought it was awesome. Thank you everyone at F5 Networks for getting this out to the community!

I'm glad to hear you're digging it naladar. I have to admit I'm a pretty big fan myself. I've found a bunch of uses for it already and this is just the trial version. Very cool stuff. Hopefully others are having similar experiences.

 

 

Colin

Hi you all,

 

 

Of course I had to try to load LTM VE on my MacBook Pro (which BTW is awesome, thanks for rating my rule in the 2009 contest!) with VMware Fusion. I had some trouble setting up two host-only networks to simulate a client and server side within my Mac. But looking at the vmx files on other systems I was able to figure out how to set it up (after which you don't want to touch the GUI network settings as it does not understand the custom configuration and defaults to one host-only network again).

 

 

I now have a fully operational development environment running on my Mac with one Ubuntu client, one LTM VE and two Ubuntu servers... great! Keep up the good work guys!

 

 

Oh BTW, is it possible to downgrade to version 9.4.x too? Still loads of devices running v9 for which there needs to be iRules developed too ;-)

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

 

Sake

 

 

PS OK... one can always wish for more, when will the iRule editor be available natively for MacOS/X? ;-)

 

This is certainly very interesting.

 

 

I am slightly concerned with the 90 day trial, I'm pondering if its worth me spending the time building a lab only to have the rug pulled out from under it in a few months.

 

 

Its not entirely clear if its just a case of applying for license renewals every 90 days (So that you guys can keep control of installations, force upgrades, or eventually make it a commercial products) or if it really is a case of 90 days and then pay. (And then we're into wrangling with my company taking forever to raise a PO for *any* amount of money and having to arrange a server to host it on, rather than using my home desktop!)

 

 

EULA isn't clear at all (Its just the generic one on the download link and it looks like i will have to install and activate to find out on the rest)

 

 

PS, do we know if this will tie in with enterprise manager if i do get it running on proper servers?

Firstly thanks F5 for having the sense to release this product. There's nothing worse than not being able to spend time learning a product properly, and for the vendor to actually encourage this is an obvious yet rare thing to do!

 

 

I agree with Steve on the the license issue. What happens after 90 days. My plan for this is for it to have a permanent place in my lab, but this requires a permanent licensing scheme. I don't mind paying a small amount, and I don't mind it being crippled..

 

 

I'm also curious how F5 are going to use this product to increase/maintain share. F5 units are really good, and really expensive. That's fine for production, but when you also have to put them into your pre-prod, staging, and development environments, as well as one for the network geeks to play with, it gets silly.

 

 

One thing this new product could do really well is provide different levels of cripple - so for example a free (or really cheap) version for the lab, which maybe reboots every 6 hours and only allows 256kbs of throughput - so there's no way it can sneakily be used for small production sites.

 

 

Then maybe a 'still cheap but not given away' version for development environments, which maybe doesn't reboot itself but is still low performance only.

 

 

Then maybe something which is performance limited, but you're allowed to burst for load testing..

 

 

Then the real boxes of course for live deployments.

 

 

By doing this, F5 becomes a much more viable proposition commercially, and it will at the end of the day help sell more LTMs.

 

 

I say this as I'm in a position where we're refreshing our dev, staging, and preprod envionments, and the F5 part of the project will cost more than all the rest of the network infrastrucuture combined. Some inexpensive VM options would mean we keep F5..

 

 

Also I really want one of these in my Lab ;-)

My use will be primarily when i get weird and wacky requests (Which i normally answer with i don't see why not, but I can't be 100% sure, often resulting in alternative solutions) and for iRule development / testing.

 

Our scalaibility / testing lab will still need proper LTMs, its just always hard to do iRule development in there because we (Networks team) don't own the web servers

It would be cool if you could collect a sample of traffic out of an existing LTM environment maybe on a per VIP basis and do a playback though the LTM VE. For example if you are trying to tweak a rule or a load balancing method on the LTM VE it would be good to be able to pass a sample of vip traffic though and see how things behave.

 

 

I am glad to see someone trying the setup on VMware Fusion. Is there any support for the free Vmware player?

Is there any talk about allowing customers to purchase non-expiring license for these VE's ? Just so they dont have to renew every 90 days?

@Chris - That would indeed be wicked cool, but assuming you're using a test client that can access both systems wouldn't it be relatively trivial to repeat the traffic for the test after changing a host entry somewhere to push it through the VE? I guess that's assuming a lot about the network config, and many folks won't be able to access the VE from certain test systems, but still, just a thought. The idea is intriguing for sure.

 

 

@Nathan - Yes, there's talk. That's all it is so far, but yes, there's talk.

 

 

Colin

Dev. Team,

 

 

This is simply awesome news - I just got the e-mail for it this morning and I plan to test it out tonight and next week. If we can use a virtual CLI as well as the web interface this would have serious benefits not to just lab work, but team training and multi-scenario testing as well.

 

 

I agree with another post in that multiple versions would be welcome (upgrades and downgrades), particularly for new feature testing, regression). This is particularly important to validate that no functionality breaks during upgrades, but I imagine it's not an easy feature to build in, if at all.

 

 

As also stated earlier, if a renewal license becomes expensive then shops that can use the VE will effectively be set back to square one. We really can't an investment in a virtual lab that will quickly become cost prohibitive. I've been using F5's for the better part of a decade and if the tool remains free or low-cost, then this makes a terrific testing and training platform that helps facilitate real justifications for physical units, upgrades, etc.

 

 

A few quick questions:

 

 

1.) Is full CLI available in the tool?

 

 

2.) Can this perform other CLI features such as Tcpdump, Qkview, etc.

 

 

3.) Will this support authentication & authorization such as full Big-IP's?

 

 

4.) Do you anticipate the ability to upgrade or downgrade the Virtual LTM, provide a multi-version or a version 9 VE? (A virtual LTM that we can upgrade from v9 to v10 and vice versa would be fabulous.)

 

 

5.) Do you anticipate that this remain a free product / free license or low-cost?

 

 

This all being said - a free product such as this is simply wonderful to validate configurations prior to rolling out to our production Big-IP's.

 

 

Well done to the F5 Dev. & programming team for their hard work! I am eagerly looking forward to testing it soon!

 

 

- G