For more information regarding the security incident at F5, the actions we are taking to address it, and our ongoing efforts to protect our customers, click here.

Forum Discussion

daveram_265365's avatar
daveram_265365
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 10, 2016

Viprion (Running vCMP) vs BIG-IP 5000 Series (Running vCMP)

Just wondering, is there much difference in configuration between these two hardware platforms? I understand, they all run BIG-IP. My main areas is what differences are there and any gotchas? i.e. Vi...
application delivery
ASM Advanced WAF
LTM
security
Jason_Hawke's avatar
Jason_Hawke
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 13, 2016

vCMP on a VIPRION vs an appliance is the same from a configuration perspective. What is different is the clustering aspect that the VIPRION allows you to implement giving you more fault tolerance and scalability.

 

For instance if you had two physical appliances you could deploy a two node LTM cluster using two guest instances (one on each appliance). The HA capability of this device group is based on the physical capabilities of the appliance - so if the appliance suffers a fault all guest instances on that appliance suffer the same fault. In addition you're constrained by the physical resources that the appliance ships with.

 

A VIPRION is a chasis/blade based solution. This means that scalability and fault tolerance of components is EXTREME! Want to double the compute power of your LTM guest - just add CPU's from other blades in the chasis. Did one of your DIMMS go bad? No problem - just acquiesce that blade in the cluster and do a hot swap.

 

So you definitely pay more for the VIPRION but you get a lot more in return. F5 was smart to offer vCMP in non-VIPRION devices because many people can benefit from the virtualization that vCMP affords. Need both a production environment and a test environment? No problem - spin up more guest instances.

 

Hope that helps!