Thanks for checking out the forums for the BIG-IP LTM VE. This is where you can come to discuss your experiences with LTM VE, ask questions of others that are using it, share suggestions, and look for help. This is not official technical support so there are no SLAs but the DevCentral community usually does an outstanding job of helping each other out, and you'll likely find a wealth of knowledge and experience here. So let us know how you like it, or if you haven't seen it yet check out the BIG-IP LTM VE page on DevCentral to get started. Click here Colin

I finally had a chance to check this out this weekend and thought it was awesome. Thank you everyone at F5 Networks for getting this out to the community!

I'm glad to hear you're digging it naladar. I have to admit I'm a pretty big fan myself. I've found a bunch of uses for it already and this is just the trial version. Very cool stuff. Hopefully others are having similar experiences. Colin

Hi you all, Of course I had to try to load LTM VE on my MacBook Pro (which BTW is awesome, thanks for rating my rule in the 2009 contest!) with VMware Fusion. I had some trouble setting up two host-only networks to simulate a client and server side within my Mac. But looking at the vmx files on other systems I was able to figure out how to set it up (after which you don't want to touch the GUI network settings as it does not understand the custom configuration and defaults to one host-only network again). I now have a fully operational development environment running on my Mac with one Ubuntu client, one LTM VE and two Ubuntu servers... great! Keep up the good work guys! Oh BTW, is it possible to downgrade to version 9.4.x too? Still loads of devices running v9 for which there needs to be iRules developed too ;-) Cheers, Sake PS OK... one can always wish for more, when will the iRule editor be available natively for MacOS/X? ;-)

This is certainly very interesting. I am slightly concerned with the 90 day trial, I'm pondering if its worth me spending the time building a lab only to have the rug pulled out from under it in a few months. Its not entirely clear if its just a case of applying for license renewals every 90 days (So that you guys can keep control of installations, force upgrades, or eventually make it a commercial products) or if it really is a case of 90 days and then pay. (And then we're into wrangling with my company taking forever to raise a PO for *any* amount of money and having to arrange a server to host it on, rather than using my home desktop!) EULA isn't clear at all (Its just the generic one on the download link and it looks like i will have to install and activate to find out on the rest) PS, do we know if this will tie in with enterprise manager if i do get it running on proper servers?

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 ;-)

Welcome to the BIG-IP LTM VE forums

hooleylist
Cirrostratus
Aug 29, 2012
Hi BA,

I think this might be due to a browser incompatibility or bug in the new post editor for the forums. Which OS/browser are you trying? Can you try in Chrome and/or IE?

If you have a question can you reply to this post for now?

Thanks, Aaron
BA_7682
Nimbostratus
Aug 29, 2012
Hi hoolio,

I tried both IE and Chrome, turned off my anti virus too but still the same. I could add/edit Subject and Summary in the new Topic but the Message text box doesnt load properly. I tried refreshing editor too but didnt help.

could it be my network firewall blocking it? I ll try posting it later from somewhere, else I ll reply to this post.

Thanks!!
fubarSUSHI
Altocumulus
Jan 27, 2014
Not sure if this thread is still active or not but is there a step by step to install LTM VE on a Mac with Fusion 6? I deployed an ova file and I cant get any connection from my mac host browser.

Im installing 11.4.1 and the network interfaces are the standard: Network Adapter: Private to my mac Network Adapter 2: vmnet2 192.168.10.x/24 Network Adapter 3: vmnet3 172.16.10.x/24 Network Adapter 4: vmnet4 10.10.10.x/24

But i still dont know how to connect to the gui from my mac. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Im trying to study for the F5 tests and Im forcing myself to switch over to OSX. I know how to set it up in windows but...
Luke_Lehman
Employee
Jan 27, 2014
I have Fusion 5.0.3, and here is my setup:

In the Fusion preferences, I have 4 "Custom" network settings:

Private to my Mac
vmnet2: Connect the host Mac to this network
vmnet3: Allow Virtual Machines on this network to connect to external networks using NAT AND Connect the host Mac to this network
vmnet4: No settings checked (this essentially is the "server" vlan and doesn't allow access to those servers unless you go through the LTM

This is what I have configured in my BIG-IP VE:

Network Adapter: vmnet2 (Acts as Mgmt Port)
Network Adapter2: vmnet3 (Acts as 1.1)
Network Adapter3: vmnet4 (Acts as 1.2)
Network Adapter4: Bridged Networking / Autodetect (you don't have to have this one connected unless you want / need it to be.

Let me know if this doesn't help out.
nirv_301008
Nimbostratus
Nov 29, 2016
hi, i have a laptop- Dell, WIN7 64 BIT. BIG-IP installed. when i connect to big-IP with one user, laptop frezzed after couple of seconds. also if i connect to BIG-IP using another credential. with another profile it works fine. but, i replaced the user laptop 3 weeks ago (because he had that problem) it worked for a while and start again. any idea what can i do? thanks,