VIPRION is the family of chassis appliances from F5 Networks. The main difference with BIG-IP, is that BIG-IP devices are standalone units with a fixed hardware resources that cannot be extended. BIG-IP units are the typical hardware appliance.
On the other hand, VIPRION extends the BIG-IP platform to an extremely high-performance, bladed device that scales on demand to provide the highest available levels of throughput and transactions per second.
VIPRION extends the BIG-IP platform to an extremely high-performance
The VIPRION platform is purpose built hardware, with a chassis form factor which will accept up to eight modular blades, which can be added or removed without disrupting applications. Instead of adding more F5 devices into the network and segmenting applications (as is required with previous BIG-IP deployments), more power can simply be added to the existing infrastructure as needed, reducing build time and reducing administrative effort.
The VIPRION chassis is passive device, which does not have its own operating system – the operating system/hypervisor runs on each blade individually. Multiple blades located within a single chassis run collectively as a cluster.
Customer running hundreds of BIG-IP devices, can reduce the F5 footprint by consolidating many existing, underutilised, physical devices into fewer chassis. Reducing the number of physical devices can bring the following additional benefits:
- Reduced maintenance and support costs.
- Improve manageability
- Reduced effort required to perform upgrades.
- Reduced rack-space, power consumption and cooling.
- Consolidate devices
- Maximize performance
- Achieve ultimate reliability
Reduced maintenance and support costs
As your infrastructure grows and requires more power for layer 4 and layer 7 processing, SSL, compression, and more, you can simply add a blade to the VIPRION chassis and it will start processing traffic automatically. Whether you’re using one blade, four blades, or eight blades, VIPRION remains one device with fixed management costs.
Improve manageability
VIPRION can help you simplify your network, by offloading servers and consolidating devices, saving management costs as well as power, space, and cooling in the data center.
With VIPRION’s massive performance and scalability, you can reduce the number of Application Delivery Controllers you need, to deliver even the most demanding applications.
Achieve Ultimate Reliability
In a VIPRION system with multiple blades, you can remove a blade without disruption.
The other blades will instantly take over the processing load. You can also deploy VIPRION in an active/standby configuration to add another level of redundancy. The chassis is built with redundant power supplies and field swappable components. This multi-layered redundancy significantly reduces the possibility of downtime.
On-demand scaling improves performance
Increase resource capacity and performance with on-demand scaling, where you can simply add more power to your existing infrastructure instead of adding more devices.
VIPRION chassis provide true linear scalability through modular blades that use F5 Clustered Multiprocessing™ (CMP) technology. As blades are added, their CPU resources, network interfaces, SSL, and compression processing power all automatically become available, as the configurations and policies are copied to the new blades from the master blade.
Operational scaling enables consolidation
F5 is able to virtualize services with a multi-tenant architecture, that supports a variety of BIG-IP® versions and product modules on a single device. Multi-tenant device virtualization is provided by F5’s unique Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP) technology, which enables VIPRION to run multiple BIG-IP guest instances.
Each BIG-IP guest instance looks and acts like a physical BIG-IP device, with a dedicated allocation of CPU, memory, and other resources. vCMP offers per-guest rate limiting for bandwidth and SSL, enabling customers to achieve different performance levels for each guest.
Each vCMP guest can further be divided, using multi-tenant features such as partitions and route domains, which can isolate configuration and networks on a per-virtual-domain basis.
Within each virtual domain, organizations can further isolate and secure configuration and policies, by using a role-based access system for greater administrative control.
The ability to virtualize BIG-IP ADC services means, service providers and enterprise users can isolate based on BIG-IP version, enabling departmental or project-based tenancy as well as performance guarantees, while getting the benefits of managing a single, consolidated application delivery platform, and increased utilization of VIPRION systems.