Welcome to the BIG-IP LTM VE forums

Firstly thanks F5 for having the sense to release this product. There's nothing worse than not being able to spend time learning a product properly, and for the vendor to actually encourage this is an obvious yet rare thing to do!

 

 

I agree with Steve on the the license issue. What happens after 90 days. My plan for this is for it to have a permanent place in my lab, but this requires a permanent licensing scheme. I don't mind paying a small amount, and I don't mind it being crippled..

 

 

I'm also curious how F5 are going to use this product to increase/maintain share. F5 units are really good, and really expensive. That's fine for production, but when you also have to put them into your pre-prod, staging, and development environments, as well as one for the network geeks to play with, it gets silly.

 

 

One thing this new product could do really well is provide different levels of cripple - so for example a free (or really cheap) version for the lab, which maybe reboots every 6 hours and only allows 256kbs of throughput - so there's no way it can sneakily be used for small production sites.

 

 

Then maybe a 'still cheap but not given away' version for development environments, which maybe doesn't reboot itself but is still low performance only.

 

 

Then maybe something which is performance limited, but you're allowed to burst for load testing..

 

 

Then the real boxes of course for live deployments.

 

 

By doing this, F5 becomes a much more viable proposition commercially, and it will at the end of the day help sell more LTMs.

 

 

I say this as I'm in a position where we're refreshing our dev, staging, and preprod envionments, and the F5 part of the project will cost more than all the rest of the network infrastrucuture combined. Some inexpensive VM options would mean we keep F5..

 

 

Also I really want one of these in my Lab ;-)