F5 Virtual Appliance

I've been slowly coming around to the F5 way of thinking for a while now. It took a while - mainly because I'm not a coder in any way - and while you slowly start to realize how amazing iRules are the more you use them, to a non-coder it often seems like an awfully complicated way of do some simple things. But you get used to it.

But F5 has two really good things which Cisco could learn from. Firstly the deventral.f5.com site. It's a community support forum - and while you can get help for all kinds of things F5 related, it's really about iRules. While most vendors have some equivalent, the great thing with devcentral is F5 encourage their finest geeks to actively post on it. You get really good answers, really quickly. I've been really impressed by it.

Second (and new) is they've done exactly what everyone is asking Cisco and Juniper to do - and released a performance crippled VM of their product. So you can lab it, play with it, learn the product well. I'm over the moon about this. Now the real test is what they do with the licensing. Currently it's a 90 day trial, which is renewable. You don't need special contracts or be a customer. You can just have one. I understand they intend to release a commercial version for long term dev/staging environments.

I love this. It means I can learn the product, mess with it, get to know it backwards. That is a good thing for me, for my employer, and for F5.

This is the opposite of what Cisco are doing. With the new restrictions on IOS licensing, dynamips/GNS3 will slowly become less useful, and I'm going to find it harder to learn the intricacies of their product.

I really do wonder at the complete disconnect that Cisco seems to have with their user base. It's kinda scary. They need to halve the number of marketing people they have, and start talking to their community. Learn a little from F5. They have the right idea on some things..