vCMP Design and Architecture

Hey Denver

I have not seen any whitepapers either regarding vCMP but there are some nice manual chapters. For instance:

Manual: vCMP for VIPRION Systems: Administration

It's a bit old and it covers VIPRION and not the iSeries chassis. But, this guide does not give you any deployment scenarios.

vCMP is a great way to segment the BIG-IP device into smaller but independent BIG-IP instances that will act entirely as an ordinary BIG-IP would. That means you can have a scenario where you have the first line of defence consisting of a guest provisioned with AFM and DNS. Then in the second tier you could have APM and ASM and lastly in the third tier LTM. But that is just playing around with the design. This should be applicable to what you need.

What I have seen at many customers, they use vCMP to create separate environments. Looking like this:

• First Guest - PROD
• Second Guest - STAGE
• Third Guest - TEST

You have the exact same version running on all guests and you have different virtual servers and pool members behind each guest. But with this, you can have the app team add features to the application in the test environment without impacting production traffic.

Same goes for upgrades. You can test your upgrades before it will actually affect production by first upgrading TEST, then STAGE and lastly PROD. If TEST and STAGING works it will most likely work for PROD as well. It is really nice when PROD are responsible for 300k active sessions and you will less likely run into unforeseen problems.

I have also seen scenarios where you have created a vCMP guest only intended for REST API calls and separating this from the other guests for the sake of security and fault tolerance. The API calls will not mistakenly screw up the production guest.

Again, if vCMP is worthwhile is part of the initial design and the need you have within the organization.