Create F5 BIG-IP Next Instance on Proxmox Virtual Environment
If you are looking to deploy a F5 BIG-IP Next instance on Proxmox Virtual Environment (henceforth referred to as Proxmox for the sake of brevity), perhaps in your home lab, here's how: First, download the BIG-IP Next OVA File from MyF5 Downloads. Copy the OVA file to your Proxmox host. I am using SCP in the example below. local $ scp BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.ovf root@proxmox:~/ On the Proxmox host, extract the contents in the OVA file: proxmox $ cd ~/ proxmox $ tar -xvf BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.ova BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.ovf BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.mf BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.cert BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136-disk1.vmdk Then, run the command below to create a virtual machine (VM) from the extracted OVF file. <vm_id> should be an unused ID on Proxmox. # qm importovf <vm_id> BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.ovf local-lvm proxmox $ qm importovf 112 BIG-IP-Next-20.0.1-2.139.10+0.0.136.ovf local-lvm Logical volume "vm-112-disk-0" created. transferred 0.0 B of 80.0 GiB (0.00%) transferred 819.2 MiB of 80.0 GiB (1.00%) transferred 1.6 GiB of 80.0 GiB (2.00%) <output truncated> transferred 80.0 GiB of 80.0 GiB (100.00%) transferred 80.0 GiB of 80.0 GiB (100.00%) You should now see a new VM created on the Proxmox GUI. Before starting the VM, we need to attach a few hardware components to the VM: a Network Device for the management interface one or more additional Network Devices for the data plane interfaces (e.g. internal and external). Note that the data plane Network Devices must be of VirtIO model Optionally, you could also configure CLI access with the following instructions Finally, start the VM. This will take a few minutes. If CLI access is available, open up the console and run kubectl get pods until you can see all pods are ready. The BIG-IP Next VM is now ready to be onboarded per instructions found here.
