Installing LTM VE on VMWare ESXi

We’ve had a few requests for a tutorial detailing the installation of F5’s new Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition on VMWare vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi). Now we have one, sort of. We decided the best way to do it was to record it as a video tutorial. If you can stand my stuttering for ten minutes, you should have a working LTM VE instance in no time.

First things first, you’ll need to get ESXi up and running before you can move on to the LTM VE portion. We’re not the experts on ESXi, so I thought it best to hand this over to VMWare. Their documentation and hardware compatibility guides can be found here. You’ll need to set up a free account with VMWare and download ESXi here.

Once you’ve installed ESXi, you’ve got the vSphere Client up and connected to ESXi, you’re ready to proceed with the LTM VE installation. Watch the video below (switch to HD in order to read the text) for a walkthrough of the LTM VE install:

At the completion of this procedure, you should have a fully functional LTM VE instance. You may run into a few snags depending on how your network interfaces are configured, but we’ve got you covered. Jason did a fantastic job of detailing how ESXi networks are configured in this blog post. Spend the time to read the post, it will be well worth your time and will explain many of the nuances of configuring ESXi’s networks.

We hope you enjoyed this video tutorial and it helps you get LTM VE running in your environment. Be sure and stop by our F5/VMWare Solutions forum for more dialog on F5 and VMWare integration.