Forum Discussion
NimbostratusF5 Lab practice at Home
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).
NacreousYou 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).
Nacreous-
If you want to run VMs, you will need more Cores and Threads. Intel CPUs of the same price range typically have much less Cores and Threads. A budget CPU like AMD Ryzen 5 1600 will work perfectly fine. If you keep the box at your home, make sure you get a quiet cooler and refrain from using the stock one. Alternatively, you can pay around 140 USD more and get Intel i7-8700 for the same amount of Cores and Threads, and 29% better performance benchmark (ref: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare). Unless you're running performance tests to a choke-point, this will not make a slightest difference. My recommendation is to save the bucks and go for AMD.
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I'd recommend 32GB. It's not ideal if you're forced to micro-manage your RAM, and possibly even be forced to deploy BigIP VMs with 2 active modules instead of 3 in some scenarios.
