Forum Discussion

Nimbostratus

Mar 17, 2018

Solved

F5 Lab practice at Home

Hi Comrades, Please advise, I am looking to setup F5 (LTM,ASM,APM) lab at home for study. So can someone advise on the home setup expense and any idea if F5 also provide any kind of lab en...

application delivery

ASM Advanced WAF

BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)

Hannes_Rapp_162
Mar 17, 2018
You can virtualize an environment with 2x BigIPs (Active-Standby), 2-4 Web Servers (i.e. Django or Apache), and have your PC act as the default gateway for BigIP cluster whereas BigIP cluster is the default gateway for all web servers.

A modern PC with AMD Ryzen CPU and 32GB RAM will easily carry this. I have this build in a tiny ITX box.

Only the PC and 2x BigIP VE Lab licenses will cost you something. For Virtualization, use Hyper-V in case you prefer Windows 10. And use KVM if you use Linux. Both will be fine. Creating your isolated networks that use VLAN tagging can be a bit difficult with KVM as the Virtual Machine Manager (the best available graphical front-end) is poorly maintained and severely buggy since 2016. However, the libvirt command line is far better than anything Hyper-V/Powershell (and arguably even better than anything VMware paid solutions) have to offer. Hyper-V does not yet support NAT networking in its GUI but it's not a major drawback either (you can create NAT network for your Hyper-V VMs in Powershell).

Hannes_Rapp_162

Nacreous

Mar 17, 2018

You can virtualize an environment with 2x BigIPs (Active-Standby), 2-4 Web Servers (i.e. Django or Apache), and have your PC act as the default gateway for BigIP cluster whereas BigIP cluster is the default gateway for all web servers.

A modern PC with AMD Ryzen CPU and 32GB RAM will easily carry this. I have this build in a tiny ITX box.

Only the PC and 2x BigIP VE Lab licenses will cost you something. For Virtualization, use Hyper-V in case you prefer Windows 10. And use KVM if you use Linux. Both will be fine. Creating your isolated networks that use VLAN tagging can be a bit difficult with KVM as the Virtual Machine Manager (the best available graphical front-end) is poorly maintained and severely buggy since 2016. However, the libvirt command line is far better than anything Hyper-V/Powershell (and arguably even better than anything VMware paid solutions) have to offer. Hyper-V does not yet support NAT networking in its GUI but it's not a major drawback either (you can create NAT network for your Hyper-V VMs in Powershell).