Lightboard Lessons: SSL Transactions Per Second

I opened a case with F5 Support for clarification on this mid-last year:

Question:

I was following "sol6475: Overview of SSL TPS licensing limits" to get licensing information about SSL TPS, and got some discrepancy in the output.

Method 1:

 tmsh show sys license detail | grep -i perf_SSL_total_TPS
perf_SSL_total_TPS [unlimited]

Method 2:

 tmsh show /sys license
...
SSL, 500 TPS Per Core
...

So how exactly am I licensed for SSL TPS?


Answer:

Message 1:

My name is XXXX, I'll be happy to assist with this SSL TPS inquiry.

Because your software perf_SSL_total_TPS is '[unlimited]', you're subject to the hardware platform limitation for SSL TPS.  There are eight logical processor cores in a B2100 blade, so 'SSL, 500 TPS Per Core' means a total of 4000 SSL TPS.

You can see that this lines up with the 'Included SSL TPS: 4,000/Blade' specification in the VIPRION 2100 Blade datasheet:

https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/viprion-overview-ds.pdf

Let me know if that clarifies the SSL TPS licensing on your system, or if I can assist further.

Thanks and regards,
...


Message 2:


Good morning Jie,

Regarding your question about HT-Split (separation of allocation of dedicated CPU cores for admin and data plane tasks), the software knows it has to account for this, and applies a total SSL TPS limit of '2 x per_core_rate_limit x number_of_cores'.  So while you have 4x TMM instances, your SSL TPS is still 4000 (2 x 500 x 4).
...