There’s a lot more to the story around F5 Virtual Editions performance numbers, as they often outpace published materials. The team at WorldTech IT has developed what we call a “dynamic F5 VE datasheet” that will help you with understand sizing, estimating performance, and licensing for the F5’s BIG-IP on different hypervisors – it can be found here – Understanding F5 BIG-IP VE Performance, Sizing, and Licensing – Dynamic Datasheet.
THROUGHPUT LICENSED VE
| Performance | Starting | Maximum |
| L7 requests per second | 3,000 | 450,000 |
| L4 connections per second | 2,000 | 135,000 |
| L4 throughput | 25 Mbps | 10 Gbps** |
| Maximum L4 concurrent connections | 1 million | 10 million |
| SSL | Starting | Maximum |
| SSL RSA TPS (2K keys) | 900 | 3,800 |
| SSL throughput (RSA) | 23 Mbps | 4 Gbps |
| SSL ECC TPS | 1,200 | 20,000*** |
| SSL throughput (ECC) | 23 Mbps | 5.4 Gbps |
| Software Compression | Starting | Maximum |
| Compression throughput | 20 Mbps | 4 Gbps | DNS | Starting | Maximum |
| Query response per second | 1,000 | 250,000 |
Note: BIG-IP APM specifications are maintained within this support.f5.com article.
* Maximum performance specs are based on ideal lab testing conditions with maximum supported vCPUs and may vary due to customer or cloud provider environmental conditions, type of hypervisor used, and capacity of host server hardware. Please refer to SOL14810 on askf5.com for specific license and performance details that may impact your performance.
** 10 Gbps throughput requires use of NICs that support SR-IOV.
*** Based on ECDHE_ECDSA_AES256_GCM_SHA384 cipher string, running BIG-IP TMOS v12.1
HIGH PERFORMANCE VE
| Performance | Maximum |
| L7 requests per second | 4.6 million |
| L4 connections per second | 1.4 million |
| L4 throughput | 85 Gbps** |
| SSL | Maximum |
| SSL RSA TPS (2K keys) | 30,000 |
| SSL throughput (RSA) | 32 Gbps |
| SSL ECC TPS | 100K |
| SSL Throughput (ECC) | 37 Gbps |
| SSL with Intel QAT | Maximum |
| SSL RSA TPS (2K keys) | 95K |
| SSL throughput (RSA) | 60 Gbps |
| SSL ECC TPS | 59K |
| SSL Throughput (ECC) | 46 Gbps |
| BIG-IP DNS | Maximum |
| Query responses per second | 1.8 million |
BIG-IP VE FOR SMARTNICS
| | DDoS Attack Size Mitigation | VE CPU Utilization |
| DDoS Protection without SmartNIC | 2.5 Gbps | 100% |
| DDoS Protection with SmartNIC | 40 Gbps | 27% |
| | L4 Throughput | VE CPU Utilization |
| CGNAT (NAT44 NAPT) without SmartNIC | 37 Gpbs | 87% |
| CGNAT (NAT44 NAPT) with SmartNIC | 48 Gbps | 4% |
| | L4 Throughput | VE CPU Utilization |
| L4 Acceleration without SmartNIC | 36 Gbps | 81% |
| L4 Acceleration with SmartNIC | 48 Gbps | 4% |
Note: BIG-IP APM specifications are maintained within this support.f5.com article.
SUPPORTED HYPERVISORS AND LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS
F5 offers the most flexible deployment options in the industry, with support across all major
virtualization platforms.
| | Lab | 25 Mbps | 200 Mbps | 1 Gbps | 3 Gbps | 5 Gbps | 10 Gbps |
| VMware vSphere | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| KVM and Community Xen | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Hyper-V | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | |
* Maximum performance specs are based on ideal lab testing conditions, optimized host and guest settings, maximum supported vCPUs, SR-IOV capable NICs, and may vary due to customer or cloud provider environmental conditions, type of hypervisor used, and capacity of host server hardware and NICs. Please refer to SOL14810 on askf5.com for specific license and performance details that may impact your performance.
** 85 Gbps throughput achieved using Mellanox CX-5 100G NIC configured for SR-IOV using KVM CentOS 7.5.
| | High-Perf. SR-IOV | High-Perf. Paravirtualized Driver |
| KVM | ✔ | ✔(Virtio) |
| VMware vSphere | ✔ | ✔(Vmxnet3) |
SUPPORTED PUBLIC CLOUD IAAS PROVIDERS
F5 offers support for leading public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.
| | Lab | 25 Mbps | 200 Mbps | 1 Gbps | 3 Gbps | 5 Gbps | 10 Gbps* | HPVE* |
| Amazon Web Services** and GovCloud | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔† | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ (20G)*** |
| Amazon IC Marketplace | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | | | |
| Microsoft Azure and Government | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔† | ✔ | ✔ (10G)**** | ✔ (10G)**** |
| Google Cloud Platform | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| VMware on IBM Cloud†† | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | ✔ | | |
| Alibaba Cloud International | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Oracle Cloud Infrastructure† | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | | ✔ | ✔ | |
* 10Gbps & HPVE throughput limit applies to non-Internet facing IP traffic only—due to cloud platform ingress throughput limitations.
** Includes VMware on AWS.
*** Achievable using AWS ENA NIC with Gen5 EC2 instances (multi—NIC interfaces and v14.1.x and higher)
**** Achievable using Azure Accelerated Networking (multi-NIC interfaces and v15.0 and higher)
† BYOL only
†† Utility (PAYG) billing only
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