set Persist iRule to match across virtual server

That's ok. You should still be able to handle it similarly. You will likely still want to create a source address persist profile with the "across virtuals" box checked and assign it to the virtual. Then you would use a rule more like this:

 
    if { not ( [IP::client_addr] starts_with "195.53.125.1" ) } { 
       persist cookie insert "MyCookieName" 
    } 
 

The available syntaxes for the "persist cookie" command are:

persist cookie

persist cookie insert ?"name"? ??

persist cookie rewrite ?"name"? ??

persist cookie passive ?"name"?

persist cookie hash "name" ?{ ?? } ???

?? denotes an optional argument.

is of the format: "d ::" or simply ""

You can assign both persist profiles to the virtual on the command line or in the bigip.conf file (the first one listed is the default), however the GUI does not support this. Then you can use your rule to simply select between the persistence types and you don't need to specify all the characteristics in the rule.

Hope this helps.