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InquisitiveMai
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Aug 21, 2022

iSeries 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,
    Patrik

  • 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.