On this post we will go through an error we got deploying a brand new F5 Virtual Machine on VMWare ESX 6.5, as part of the deployment we first encountered the issue described in our previous post, BIG-IP fails to install on VMWare 6.5. When we managed to solve the issue, and when we reached the last step of the Setup Wizard we received a different error message, this time from the F5 Setup Utility itself.

Problem

When deploying a brand new F5 VE, on the last step of the Setup utility we got the following message on the GUI:

01071008:3 Provisioning failed with error 1 0 'Disk limit exceeded.16188 MB are required to provision these modules, but only 30 MB are available.'

Troubleshooting

With the error message we did a quick search on F5 Support and we got these solutions:

K14952: Extending disk space on BIG-IP VE https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K14952

K14843: Reallocating the disk resource when provisioning multiple modules on the BIG-IP VE system and BIG-IP vCMP guests https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K14843

K04851801: The BIG-IP system no longer allocates disk space to the vg_reserved volume for BIG-IP VE and vCMP guests https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K04851801

Solution

The solution consists on a two step process. First we extended the Disk space allocated to the VM changing the Disk settings on VMware ESXi. The disk space was originally set to 9GB, which is too small, we set it to 100 GB.
However, changing the disk space allocated to the VM on VMware won’t achieve anything if we don’t resize the volumes/directories on the F5 itself. So next step was to extend the volumes on the F5 VE, using tmsh commands:

We list the current size for the volume:

tmsh list /sys disk logical-disk HD1 all-properties

We modify vg-reserved to 10GB:

tmsh modify /sys disk logical-disk HD1 vg-reserved 10000

We did follow the solution advised on the article, but the issue remains, in this case, the partition running out of space was actually appdata, we resized it running these commands:

tmsh modify /sys disk directory /appdata new-size 31457280
tmsh save /sys config
reboot

After performing the change and restarting the VM, we were able to complete the Setup Utility and have a working F5 VE.

So there you have it, an important tip to identify on what directory you are running out of space, is to use the information on the error message (on our example it mentioned only 30 MB were available) and compare that with the directories and their available size using the command:

tmsh show /sys disk directory

You can also get the same information using the old good: ‘df -h’ command

Deploying F5 VE on virtual environments is just one of several services where we can help you. If you need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact us!.