I am retiring some of our 6900's and 3600's to migrate to a Viprion 2400. Does anyone use vCMP yet? If you virtualize the instances, is the performance less than not virtualizing the instances? Has vCMP been out long enough that you would feel comfortable running production on it? I'm just looking for some actual real life user feedback on it.

Good questins. I'm looking forward to doign this at some stage this year or next myself. Withr egards to performance, tmm itself shouldn't be any slower as the CPU cores themselves are dedicated to a particular tmm instance. IIUC network interfaces (Physical) are shared too. But they come with 10Gb NIC's (2x sfp+'s with a blade) so that hsoluldn't be any more of an issue that sharing the 10Gb links between your core switches (If you're lucky enough for a 10Gb backbone :). The only thing I'm not confident of is the SSL offload hardware. The encryption hardware is going to be shared between instances. As is the license for it. And I THINK that the license is enforced globally. So if you have qa 500TPS license, and one of your vCMP's bursts 5 SSL negotiations in a 10ms window, you will ikely get license failures in the other vCMP's... vCMP itself has been out as long as v11... So if you're comfortable with v11, you should feel comfortable with vCMP... But as always, test, test and retest... H H

We are actually consolidating several platforms (6400/3900/1500) onto the VIPRION C2400 platform right now using vCMP. At first, I encountered several problems - mostly not due to vCMP specific problems but because of general v11 issues. If you haven't made the jump to v11 on any boxes yet, be prepared for some pretty drastic changes - especially in the HA department (with the introduction of traffic/device group/sync groups/etc). It would appear that with 4 vCMP guests virtualized on a single B2100 blade, each vCMP guest should have the equivalent processing power of somewhere in between a single 6900 and 8950. The B2100's really excel in L4, and can push ~40gbps of L4. This is actually what the BIG-IP 11000 is spec'd at. Real world performance - I can't yet tell, because I only have a minimal amount of traffic on the VIPRION platform at this time. Regarding SSL TPS licensing. Each core on the B2100 blade has 500TPS included with the base license. All of this stated capacity (2000 SSL TPS/blade) is available to any and all vCMP guests. Any guest that is not currently using any SSL will not contend for any SSL resources. If one guest needs 2000 TPS, and the others aren't using any, one guest will get the entire 2000 TPS (even if that guest is using one blade). This is how it was explained to me by my SE. My beef with vCMP at this time is resource allocation. There is a 1:1 ratio of CPU:vCMP guest, meaning that if I have a B2100 that only has 3 vCMP guests, I am basically wasting an entire CPU core in the B2100. I can not allocate 2 CPU cores to 1 vCMP guest, therefore I am wasting a processing core. The only way to provide more processing power for a vCMP guest is to add another blade in to the chassis. Once you do this, you only then have the option to make a vCMP guest span "one" or "multiple" blades. Not very flexible, in my opinion. Josh

I think Josh's summary is quite good and accurate. Not very flexible... I'd encourage you to also give this feedback to F5 Support and your account team. PD is actively working to address the flexibility issues with vCMP. But opening RFEs would help with prioritization. Thanks, Aaron

Interesting, so you can only assign one core per guest per blade? So I could do 2 cores for a guest if I have 2 blades? I just bought 2 blades per chassis at the moment. So I was only planning on splitting it up into 2 guests, so that would be a lot of cores wasted at the moment. I'm in the process of racking it up in my lab at the moment to start POC'ing it out.

Nick, Yes, you can currently only assign one core per guest per blade. If you have two blades, you can have one guest span both blades which would give that guest 2 cores (1 core per blade). Yes, unfortunately, you need at least 4 guests to fully utilize all of the processing power of each blade. You could have 4 guests that each spanned both blades - 2 cores per guest. I do have an RFE open regarding this "issue." Josh

vCMP on Viprion 2400

23 Replies

Jose_Farnesio_4
Nimbostratus
Jul 10, 2013
Can someone shed some light here.

Version 11.4

http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/tmos-implementations-11-4-0/13.html

Version 11.1

http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-implementations-11-1-0/11.html

The procedures on these articles don't show the steps to achieve this

Technically what I am trying to achieve is assigning a VLAN to a Route Domain on a vCMP Guest Partition other than the "Common"

Currently, any VLAN created on the vCMP host, once assigned to the vCMP Guest, it automatically goes to the partition "Common". How do you assign a VLAN or create a VLAN on a partition so it can be assigned to a Route Domain on that Partition to avoid the error below?

General error: 01070726:3: Route domain /PArtitionA/RD1 can only reference (VLAN) /Common/VCMP_1-VLAN in the same partition or if the route domain is in the Common partition in statement [SET TRANSACTION END]
Josh_41258
Nimbostratus
Jul 11, 2013
We re-built on v11/vCMP as well. We had numerous boxes running v10. We pre-created the VIP's with ARP disabled and manually re-created all configuration on the VIPRION platform. Once we were ready to migrate, we simply disabled ARP on the older BIG-IP boxes, and enabled ARP for the virtual address on the vCMP guest.

Josh
- VFB
  Cirrus
  Mar 19, 2014
  Just curious but how many VCMP guests can you build out on a viprion? It doesn't show in the datasheets from F5. Maybe I overlooked it but I find it rather odd that they left it out.

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vCMP on Viprion 2400

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