Welcome to the BIG-IP LTM VE forums

If I understand your explanation as well as the documentation correctly, it would indeed be as useful as you indicate in the hypervisor examples you listed if we could have the option of HA in the VE configurations (currently not supported).

 

 

I can tell you that HA, while it's not perfect quite yet in this VE, it will begin to form in subsequent releases to behave much like a physcial box would. I've been tinkering with an active/standby pair implementing network failover and connection mirroring on an HTTP virtual. We can work on getting examples of HA configurations in the docs for upcoming releases.

 

 

For example - if you're working in version 9 software and you want to test an upgrade to another version of 9, or even the latest version of v10 - you cannot predict how an actual product upgrade will occur

 

 

True, and that would be really nice if we could watch the mock upgrade go down, but this is a completely different platform from the perspective of the operating system. The line in the sand starts here, at version 10.1.0, where you can start tinkering with parts of your config. For example, I've been using the 'bigpipe merge' functionality to cut virtual servers, nodes, pools, and iRules out of my 9.x configs and apply them to 10.1.0 VE. It's useful for testing migration of my most customized config objects in 10.x. While it doesn't test the exact workflow you'd follow in a real physical migration, it tests whether your existing 9.x config elements will load.

 

 

What good is a VE tool to me with v10 software when I'm running 9?

 

 

It's just for checking out the functionality of v10.

 

 

The VE product will provide for function and feature testing, but will not enable validation of key critical areas for the code on platforms themselves, so it will consequently have some level of limited application in our lab.

 

 

You are correct. This is a limitation we cannot sidestep since this is a completely different platform. Unless you plan on deploying production virtual systems. The one thing you should be able to count on though, is the core configuration elements (in bigip.conf, for example) like big, scary iRules. Those are supposed to load *and work* in VE and should when applied from VE to subsequent releases down the code line.

 

 

You have a lot of very good points, keem 'em coming.