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gurmjaspreet_30's avatar
gurmjaspreet_30
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Mar 17, 2018
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F5 Lab practice at Home

Hi Comrades,   Please advise, I am looking to setup F5 (LTM,ASM,APM) lab at home for study.   So can someone advise on the home setup expense and any idea if F5 also provide any kind of lab en...
application delivery
ASM Advanced WAF
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
  • Hannes_Rapp_162's avatar
    Hannes_Rapp_162
    Mar 17, 2018

    You can virtualize an environment with 2x BigIPs (Active-Standby), 2-4 Web Servers (i.e. Django or Apache), and have your PC act as the default gateway for BigIP cluster whereas BigIP cluster is the default gateway for all web servers.

     

    A modern PC with AMD Ryzen CPU and 32GB RAM will easily carry this. I have this build in a tiny ITX box.

     

    Only the PC and 2x BigIP VE Lab licenses will cost you something. For Virtualization, use Hyper-V in case you prefer Windows 10. And use KVM if you use Linux. Both will be fine. Creating your isolated networks that use VLAN tagging can be a bit difficult with KVM as the Virtual Machine Manager (the best available graphical front-end) is poorly maintained and severely buggy since 2016. However, the libvirt command line is far better than anything Hyper-V/Powershell (and arguably even better than anything VMware paid solutions) have to offer. Hyper-V does not yet support NAT networking in its GUI but it's not a major drawback either (you can create NAT network for your Hyper-V VMs in Powershell).

     

Hannes_Rapp_162's avatar
Hannes_Rapp_162
Icon for Nacreous rankNacreous

You can virtualize an environment with 2x BigIPs (Active-Standby), 2-4 Web Servers (i.e. Django or Apache), and have your PC act as the default gateway for BigIP cluster whereas BigIP cluster is the default gateway for all web servers.

 

A modern PC with AMD Ryzen CPU and 32GB RAM will easily carry this. I have this build in a tiny ITX box.

 

Only the PC and 2x BigIP VE Lab licenses will cost you something. For Virtualization, use Hyper-V in case you prefer Windows 10. And use KVM if you use Linux. Both will be fine. Creating your isolated networks that use VLAN tagging can be a bit difficult with KVM as the Virtual Machine Manager (the best available graphical front-end) is poorly maintained and severely buggy since 2016. However, the libvirt command line is far better than anything Hyper-V/Powershell (and arguably even better than anything VMware paid solutions) have to offer. Hyper-V does not yet support NAT networking in its GUI but it's not a major drawback either (you can create NAT network for your Hyper-V VMs in Powershell).

 

Hannes_Rapp_162's avatar
Hannes_Rapp_162
Icon for Nacreous rankNacreous
Mar 18, 2018

  1. If you want to run VMs, you will need more Cores and Threads. Intel CPUs of the same price range typically have much less Cores and Threads. A budget CPU like AMD Ryzen 5 1600 will work perfectly fine. If you keep the box at your home, make sure you get a quiet cooler and refrain from using the stock one. Alternatively, you can pay around 140 USD more and get Intel i7-8700 for the same amount of Cores and Threads, and 29% better performance benchmark (ref: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare). Unless you're running performance tests to a choke-point, this will not make a slightest difference. My recommendation is to save the bucks and go for AMD.

     

  2. I'd recommend 32GB. It's not ideal if you're forced to micro-manage your RAM, and possibly even be forced to deploy BigIP VMs with 2 active modules instead of 3 in some scenarios.