What do I need to setup a working F5 lab

First of all, if you are an absolute beginner, you will need to learn some F5 basics first.

There is a free F5 LTM Essentials training course available online at https://university.f5.com/

Re: the Lab: you just need to install and spin up the virtual editions and configure them.

Check out this excellent post from Jason Rahm dating back 2010 about how to configure your virtual F5s:

https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/networking-options-with-ltm-ve

I also recommend that you install a proper back-end web server virtual machine for your tests in the lab. A simple Linux server with Apache will do, for example Ubuntu Server VM - which can be downloaded free - just Google for it.

I usually also download and run Jenkins (https://jenkins-ci.org/) as it will run on a different port (8080) so you can have 2 backend servers on one VM. Jenkins is also good as it has a login mechanism/cookies - so usually pretty handy for testing iRules.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Sam