Forum Discussion
InquisitiveMai
Cirrostratus
CirrostratusiSeries vs VIPRION
I want to know when would someone go for iSeries 5000 and 7000. I understand the physical difference like VIPRIONs have blades to expand but iSeries donot. I would like to know other differences. Can anyone please share some good articles on it.
Been a while since I purchased hardware but:
Viprion was great when having to expand your capacity over time. My main issue with it though was that when buying ie. ASM you had to buy a license for whatever the chassis could handle. Example: If you had a chassis that could take 4 blades you'd have to pay for ASM as if you had 4 blades installed even if you only had 1.
5000 or 7000 series is more or less just about performance I reckon. Though you might want to validate that the buy the correct version if you need vCMP support (F5s Hypervisor) as some versions do not have it.
Kind regards,
PatrikThe differences are mostly about capacity and consumption. The VIPRION is a chassis-based product that you can add on to as your throughput and consumption requirements change: https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/viprion-overview-ds.pdf. The VIPRION provides additional redundancy, scaling, and horsepower.
iSeries is a datacenter appliance: https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/big-ip-platforms-datasheet.pdf
VIPRION supports breaking up compute into vCMP instances (multiple virtual BIG-IPs each doing their own thing), or you can configure a "super-BIG-IP" that consumes all compute. Most iSeries appliances can also do vCMP, but of course at a smaller scale. other differences include:
- Licensing on VIPRION is done at the chassis host (not the tenants)
- Low-level networking on VIPRION is done at the chassis host. The tenant receives VLANs.
Otherwise, tenant BIG-IP instances on a VIPRION behave exactly the same way as appliance instances.
- Kevin_Stewart
Employee
The differences are mostly about capacity and consumption. The VIPRION is a chassis-based product that you can add on to as your throughput and consumption requirements change: https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/viprion-overview-ds.pdf. The VIPRION provides additional redundancy, scaling, and horsepower.
iSeries is a datacenter appliance: https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/big-ip-platforms-datasheet.pdf
VIPRION supports breaking up compute into vCMP instances (multiple virtual BIG-IPs each doing their own thing), or you can configure a "super-BIG-IP" that consumes all compute. Most iSeries appliances can also do vCMP, but of course at a smaller scale. other differences include:
- Licensing on VIPRION is done at the chassis host (not the tenants)
- Low-level networking on VIPRION is done at the chassis host. The tenant receives VLANs.
Otherwise, tenant BIG-IP instances on a VIPRION behave exactly the same way as appliance instances.
Been a while since I purchased hardware but:
Viprion was great when having to expand your capacity over time. My main issue with it though was that when buying ie. ASM you had to buy a license for whatever the chassis could handle. Example: If you had a chassis that could take 4 blades you'd have to pay for ASM as if you had 4 blades installed even if you only had 1.
5000 or 7000 series is more or less just about performance I reckon. Though you might want to validate that the buy the correct version if you need vCMP support (F5s Hypervisor) as some versions do not have it.
Kind regards,
Patrik- Nikoolayy1
MVP
Also consider reviewing rSeries and Velos as rSeries replaces the iSieries and Velos replaces the Viprion.
https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K49918625
As iSeries when provisioning it you can select the FPGA to be more optmized for SSL decryption or load balancing/web cache etc that can't be done with the VIPRION and so rSeries has the ability to overprovision(oversubscription) the bandwidth with its port groups and Velos does not support this FPGA based feature.
iSeries:
rSeries:
https://clouddocs.f5.com/training/community/rseries-training/html/rseries_networking.html
What Velos and Viprion bring to the table as it was mentioned is scalability by adding more blades over time but als you can place vCMP quests/tenants on multiple blades and if one blade goes down then the vCMP quest/tenant is still running on the other blades but with iSeries/rSeries if the devices goes down better hope that you have the latest arhives/UCS saved outside the device. Also Velos has the ability to extra isolate blades in a seperate partition where the actual tenants are created and with VIPRION you can't do that.
VIPRION:
https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K15930
VELOS:
https://www.f5.com/services/resources/white-papers/velos-multi-tenant-security-architecture
InquisitiveMaiThank you all for your response
- Nikoolayy1
This is a great summary for an article 🙂
