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Karthick1's avatar
Karthick1
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Dec 03, 2025
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BIG-IP VE: 40G Throughput from 4x10G physical NICs

    Hello F5 Community, I'm designing a BIG-IP VE deployment and need to achieve 40G throughput from 4x10G physical NICs. After extensive research (including reading K97995640), I've created this ...
application delivery
deployment
ESXI LACP
f5 ve
lacp
link aggregation
sr-iov
trunk
ve
  • Jeff_Granieri's avatar
    Jeff_Granieri
    Dec 05, 2025

    Indeed the VF per PF reference was for the left side of your branch.  Yep SR-IOV you will need to us compatible NIC's we do have a list compiled here  If you choose the ESXI Link agg option it is much simpler in terms of changes.  The VE will see 40G not the individual links.  Just be mindful you can still run into uneven distribution on flows due to hashing on the ESXi vSwitch on the 4 x 10G links.  

Karthick1's avatar
Karthick1
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Dec 05, 2025

Regarding the comment: “For your goal of 40G throughput, you may want to consider allocating 4 Virtual Functions per Physical Function within SR-IOV” — are you referring to the left side of the branch?

Which option would be preferable?
If I use SR-IOV, then I need to verify the compatible NICs.

If I choose ESXi link aggregation, I assume that on the F5 VE side I will see a single 40G link. In that case, I don’t need to change any compatibility settings for the drivers. Is that correct?