Enabling the Dynamic Data Center with BIG-IP v10

As you probably saw this morning, F5 BIG-IP v10 has landed, marking a change in the data center, creating a dynamic, agile IT data center based on Unified Application Data and Delivery Services (UADDS). Yes, it’s completely fine to stand up at your desk and start cheering on the revolution!

Under the hood there are many revolutionary technologies that enable UADDS, and one of my favorite features of BIG-IP v10 is Resource Provisioning: the ability to slice up hardware compute resources (CPU and RAM) to different modules on the system. For example, if you’re deploying BIG-IP LTM to serve mostly as your application firewall with BIG-IP ASM, you may to allocate more resources to ASM than to LTM features such as iRules. This gives the application administrator complete  control over granular BIG-IP resources, allocating them to modules as needed. Resources can also be added to evaluation modules allowing a test environment to scale the available resources to an evaluation module as needed for stress testing. 

Hardware virtualization slicing has suffered from some challenges in the past. Although modern virtualization does carve up hardware resources for sharing amongst multiple virtual systems, BIG-IP v10 Resource Provisioning is different from the traditional 1:Many hardware virtualization approach. In the traditional model, there’s no isolation between virtual systems using shared hardware resources. All processes from all virtual processes are handled in a “flat” manner by the physical CPUs. With BIG-IP’s isolation model specific portions of the hardware are allocated for a specific virtual instance and contained within that fenced area.

And even better than just slicing, Resource Provisioning also allows dynamic growth, or bursting, of resources as needed and as defined by the administrator. One of the problems with traditional hardware virtualization slicing is that it creates hard barriers that can starve resources. BIG-IP v10 Resource Provisioning removes this limitation by allowing the modules to burst and share resources when need dictates. The resource bursting policy can be defined by the administrator with hard percentages or with soft limits, allowing BIG-IP to allocate resources as needed during resource limitations.

In a nutshell, Resource Provisioning is a perfect solution to help manage computing resources as part of your Application Delivery Network (ADN). For more information on Resource Provisioning, check out the whitepaper or grab the F5 OnDemand Audio Whitepaper and listen to it on the go.