BIG-IP DNS and LTM on 1 node

I spoke to a friend I have working at F5 and these are his thoughts:

There are serval options for my deployment type and no set best practice design. It is about scalability, growth and what I am most comfortable with.

The GLB is typically deployed either on a separate piece of hardware to the LTM devices, or run within a separate vCMS (virtual instance) on the same tin and not within a separate partition (https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/vcmp-viprion-configuration-11-4-1/1.html).

The GLB typically runs in active/active mode utilizing the distributed sync groups. This is similar to a HA pair running active/active where the configuration is synced between the devices to ensure config consistency.

Based on the above you can either buy 1 physical, 2 physical, 2 Virtual or 1 physical and 1 Virtual.

This doesn’t give you a clear path/answer to follow for best practice design, it’s a follow your mind/heart approach with what you a) feel comfortable with and b) feel is most robust/scalable.

Based on this information I will be looking at 3 options:

• 2 VMs, 1 for GTM and 1 VM for the LTM partitions
• 1 physical for GTM and 1 VM for the LTM partitions
• 1 physical utilizing vCMS

That being said, anyone reading this forum with similar design questions can select anything they want as it depends on a case by case basis and your business decisions.