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Karthick1's avatar
Karthick1
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
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
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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.  

Jeff_Granieri's avatar
Jeff_Granieri
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
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
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
Dec 05, 2025

Thank you for pointing out the importance of the flow. To summarize: If you are using ESXi link aggregation, and a single flow has 30G of traffic, that particular flow—due to ESXi's hashing nature—will go through only one of the links at a maximum of 10G (real speed for single transfers = max 10G).

 

VMs will show as  40G connection

But - Real speed for single transfers = max 10G