can I divide a bigip box into two or more virtual devices ?

if it is a newer platform that supports vCMP, absolutely. If it's an older platform, you can administratively separate by partition, but not quite the same at resource levels.

this article might help

http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/14000/000/sol14088.html

Hamzeh,

Just complementing what Jason wrote, Viprion and newer platforms (5200v, 7200v and 10200v) does support adding licenses to run vCMP module. This is a BIG-IP hypervisor that runs on dedicated mode and enables the use of Guests that will run other copies of TMOS, even different versions, newer or not, from the one that runs vCMP.

vCMP is really walking towards to be almost like a VMWare ESXi, but only to run TMOS based BIG-IP images.

"Walking towards" because the granulanarity of the management is still small... from TMOS v11.x to v11.3 you could only set one or mode blades at Viprions, from 11.4.x you can set 2, 4, 8 cores per Guest. Memory sizes are statically sized by core usage and there´s no specific view for the storage part.

Note that Guest stands for VM on F5´s vCMP terminology and Blades are really the hardware that´s attached to Viprion slots. Those 3 platforms are one-piece-only hw.

On the other hand, using a combination of User Partitions and Routed Domains you can have almost the same as a Cisco or Fortigate partition where will use the same version of TMOS and the processing load of all partitions (including root) will be shared. Physical interfaces and vlans can be associated to specific routed domains on specific partitions and then run part from other traffic. Each partition have theier own users/admins.

That´s more used on low/medium cost service providers for colocation.

So whats about 8900 platforms ? is it supported and if yes does it need a licence ?

and how to make it ?

So whats about 8900 platforms ? is it supported and if yes does it need a licence ?

i do not think 8900 is going to support vcmp.