F5 1500 LTM license

I would not take the 1500 as lab unit. It is way obsolete, there are two generations of hw after it (1600 and 2000 series..) BIG-IP 1500 was launched in 2004 and end of sales in 2009. Has limited memory (2GB) and does not support current sw 11.x versions. And support contract is expensive (related to past list price).

For lab I would suggest to buy a virtual lab appliance: BIG-IP VE Lab version (ca 100 USD + support fee), which you can run on most of common hypervisors (vmware, hyper-v, xen, kvm). It is fully supported and supports current and coming major releases (11.x, 12 & 13). The VE Lab license has all the necessary functions and most optional software modules licensed. It has 10Mbps throughput limitation and may not be used in production.