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treepose_102627's avatar
treepose_102627
Historic F5 Account
Feb 18, 2010

What Hypervisors have you tried LTM VE in?

While VMware Workstation 7, ESX and ESXi 4 are supported, many of the other Hypervisors on the market are not. This does not mean that the LTM VE will not run in them. Folks have had great success with Fusion 2 and 3 as well as Virtual Box 3.

 

 

What other hypervisors have you tried LTM VE in, and what issues did you find if any?

 

27 Replies

  • This is just a follow-up to my earlier post regarding LTM VE on Open Source Xen.

     

     

    For those people who have tried this and found that the license activation does not survive VM cold restarts or migration - problem solved.

     

     

    It looks like the LTM VE kernel queries the hypervisor to request the UUID of the virtual machine it is running on.

     

    This Xen feature can be used by a guest as a sort of DRM feature.

     

     

    By default on Xen, a UUID is randomly generated upon every VM cold boot.

     

    This can be nailed down in the VM config file using a statement like:

     

     

    uuid = '74929553-f637-3dc3-7499-2184e93eb57b'

     

     

    If you've activated a licence for a VE instance on Xen and found that after a restart you're presented with " License is not operational (expired or digital signature does not match contents)." look back through the logs in /var/log/xen to find the UUID the VM had when I licensed it. Just grep for 'uuid'.

     

     

    Set the uuid property in the VM config file and restart.
  • With the advent of 10.2.2 and some changes to support Citrix XenServer some minor config changes are necessary to run LTM VE on Open Source Xen 4.0.x.

     

    Below is the config for a working LTM VE 10.2.2 on Debian Squeeze with Xen 4.0.1.

     

     

     

    import os, re

     

    arch = os.uname()[4]

     

     

    device_model = '/usr/lib/xen-default/bin/qemu-dm'

     

     

    pae=1

     

    acpi=1

     

    apic=1

     

    sdl=0

     

    vnc=1

     

    vnclisten="0.0.0.0"

     

    vncconsole=1

     

    vncpasswd=''

     

    stdvga=0

     

    serial='pty'

     

     

    kernel = '/usr/lib/xen-default/boot/hvmloader'

     

    builder = 'hvm'

     

     

    vcpus = '2'

     

    memory = '2048'

     

    shadow_memory = 8

     

    uuid = '74929553-f637-3dc3-7499-2184e93eb57b'

     

     

     

    Physical volumes

     

     

    disk = [

     

    'phy:/dev/guest/dmzlb.tst1-root,hda,w',

     

    ]

     

     

    boot on floppy (a), hard disk (c) or CD-ROM (d)

     

    default: hard disk, cd-rom, floppy

     

    boot = 'c'

     

     

     

    Hostname

     

     

    name = 'dmzlb.tst1'

     

     

     

    Networking

     

     

    dhcp = 'off'

     

    vif = [

     

    'mac=00:16:3e:3d:cd:00,type=ioemu, model=rtl8139, bridge=mgmt',

     

    'mac=00:16:3e:3d:cd:01,type=ioemu, model=rtl8139, bridge=lacp',

     

    'mac=00:16:3e:3d:cd:02,type=ioemu, model=rtl8139, bridge=lacp',

     

    ]

     

    'mac=00:16:3e:3d:cd:03,type=ioemu, model=rtl8139, bridge=lacp',

     

     

     

    Behaviour

     

     

    on_poweroff = 'destroy'

     

    on_reboot = 'restart'

     

    on_crash = 'preserve'

     

  • > So on Xen you might want to touch /var/run/VirtualBox

     

     

    Note: this is only true for attempting to run the trial edition on VirtualBox and some variants of Xen, neither of which are supported... but they should run OK.

     

     

    One does not need to touch /var/run/VirtualBox for the production Xen BIG-IP VE (available as 10.2.2).
  • How about run LTM VE on KVM? If possible, it would be good since I run most VM on KVM.

     

    For now I have to use VMware player along with KVM. VMware player was used for virtual appliance, since most of virtual appliance provided by vendors is VMware format.

     

    Other server OS run on KVM. To let it works together, vmnet NIC was added to KVM libvirt bridge.
  • As was stated in the post (which incidentally is a year old now). See the post above for 10.2.2 info.

     

     

    Whether or not a configuration is supported is really not relevant given the thread title.

     

  • I have no experience with KVM, however, you must run LTM-VE as a HVM guest regardless of your hypervisor. On linux this usually means using a qemu device model either directly through qemu or through qemu support in your chosen hypervisor.

     

     

    F5 declined to let me fix their kernel to run as a PV guest on Xen ;)

     

  • Robin_Mordasie1's avatar
    Robin_Mordasie1
    Historic F5 Account
    Has anyone gotten VE version 11 to work outside of ESX ?

     

    I would like to see it working in either vmware server or vmware fusion