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Christian_Manue's avatar
Christian_Manue
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 29, 2018

Activate add-on license in F5 VIPRION (with vCMP)

Hello, My customer have 2 VIPRION appliances with vCMP license and Guest distributed among the appliances.

 

We need to add these two add-on license in the VIPRION: F5-ADD-VPR-USER-500 & F5-ADD-VPRAPM-C2400B

 

But i have the following question:

 

  • The add-on is apply at Host Level or Guest Level?
  • If is apply a host Level, how the Guest recognizes this new license? Is it necesary a reboot of the host or the guest?
  • Is provisioning still necessary at the guest level or is this administered at the host level?
  • For the license F5-ADD-VPR-USER-500, if it is applied at the host level, is is posible to distributed among the Guests?, or these license is only apply a Guest Level?

I view these post but is not really clear: https://devcentral.f5.com/questions/activate-add-on-license-with-vcmp

 

Thanks for yours reply

 

Christian

 

add-on license
application delivery
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
LTM
vcmp
viprion
  • Philip_Jonsson's avatar
    Philip_Jonsson
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Oct 30, 2018

    Hey Cerna!

     

    • The add-on is apply at Host Level or Guest Level?

    When you are running vCMP, all licensing is handled on the Host level. The license is owned by the host and all of the underlying guests can provision all of the modules the host is licensed for. For instance, if you have LTM, DNS and ASM licensed, ALL guests that you are able to create can be provisioned with LTM, DNS and ASM.

     

    • If is apply a host Level, how the Guest recognizes this new license? Is it necesary a reboot of the host or the guest?

    The guests will inherit the license from the host. It will be automatically synced. So no reboot is required.

     

    !!WARNING!! - When reactivating the license, the guests will be unavailable until the reactivation is complete. Perform this during a service window

     

    • Is provisioning still necessary at the guest level or is this administered at the host level?

    The provisioning works as follows. The Host will only be provisioned with vCMP. When that happens it will automatically dedicate the resources required to be run as a vCMP host. After that, you create vCMP guests that will act just as "normal" BIG-IP appliances which in turn will be required to go through initial setup and thus, provisioning. Therefore, on those vCMP guests you will provision the modules you need.

     

    If you have a BEST (APM, LTM, ASM, DNS) license on your vCMP Host, all guests can use all of those modules but they need to be provisioned on each respective guests.

     

    Licensing works as follows:

     

    "The license allows you to deploy the maximum number of guests that the specific blade/platform allows."

     

    So F5 limits the license based on the amount of guests you can create. If you want to run ASM,LTM,DNS and APM, you will need to dedicate a certain amount of cores. So you might have 8 machines running each one module. Or perhaps 2 guests running them all. It's up to you.

     

    • For the license F5-ADD-VPR-USER-500, if it is applied at the host level, is is posible to distributed among the Guests?, or these license is only apply a Guest Level?

    All licensing is handled on the host. View vCMP as VMware ESXi if it makes it easier. Just because you have virtual Windows Servers running on your ESXi, if you need to re-license the ESXi environment, you apply it to the ESXi and not the Windows Server.

     

    This article is a great read to get introduced to vCMP: Introduction to the vCMP System

     

    I hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions :)