Customer Edge Site Sizing Reference
Overview
This reference documentation provides guidance around the minimum requirements for deploying a Customer Edge (CE) Site and helping you get an informed estimate of the system requirements according to their features, scale, and performance needs.
Customer Edge Site resource requirements
Notice: Effective July 1, 2025, F5 announced the End-of-Sale (EoS) of small Customer Edge (CE) nodes (with up to 4 vCPUs and 16 GB memory) for both Mesh and App Stack deployments on F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
Existing small CE nodes will be supported until July 1, 2028, or the end of the customer’s contract, whichever occurs first. Customers with small CE nodes will continue to receive support during this period, and are advised to plan their transition to medium CE nodes within this timeframe.
A CE Site is deployed as a cluster with three control nodes and optional worker nodes. The minimum resource requirements for each node are 8 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM, and 80 GB disk storage for Mesh nodes or 100 GB disk storage for App Stack nodes.
F5 offers two sizes of nodes, depending on performance requirements:
- Medium: 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM
- Large: 16 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM
For deploying CE sites on providers, like VMware, KVM, or a CE as a pod on Kubernetes, the instances/VMs can be created with the recommended CPU and memory listed above.
For public cloud providers, these instance flavors are recommended:
| Provider | Medium | Large | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | m5.2xlarge | m5.4xlarge | |
| Azure | Standard_D8s_v4 | Standard_D16s_v4 | |
| GCP | n2-standard-8 t2d-standard-8 a2-highgpu-2g | n2-standard-16 t2d-standard-16 a2-highgpu-4g | |
| OCI | VM.Standard.E6.Flex (8 vCPU - 4 OCPUs, 32 GB RAM) | VM.Standard.E6.Flex (16 vCPU - 8 OCPUs, 64 GB RAM) | For OCI, you must select the correct instance shape, and set the required CPU and memory. |
NIC support per CE node
The Secure Mesh Site v2 workflow supports up to eight network interfaces per CE node. However, the maximum limit per instance size varies depending on your cloud provider:
| Cloud provider | Instance size | Maximum supported interfaces |
|---|---|---|
| AWS, Azure, and OCI | Medium | Up to four interfaces |
| AWS, Azure, and OCI | Large | Up to eight interfaces |
| GCP | Medium and large | Up to eight interfaces |
Caution: You must allocate all network interfaces assigned to each CE Site node to different subnets. You must pre-configure these unique subnets in your infrastructure prior to deploying your CE Site nodes.
Baremetal hardware requirements
A CE Site deployed on a baremetal server will use all of its available resources. Therefore, the server must have the minimum required CPU and memory resources as mentioned above. Additionally, it must also have the following:
- 1x 1000Mb/s Intel-based NIC
- 1 USB 2.0/3.0 for imaging the host
- 1 HDMI for accessing local console
The supported network interface controller (NIC) hardware for baremetal servers are:
- Intel XXV710 (10/25G)
- Intel X710 10G SFP
- Intel XL710 40G QSFP
- Intel X710-T4L Quad Port 10GbE BASE-T
- Intel X710-T2L Dual Port 10GbE BASE-T Adaptor
- Intel E810-XXV Quad Port 10/25GbE SFP28
- Intel i350 1G
Recommended CE Site scale limits
The data plane resource limits scales with the size of the CE. This also dictates the maximum data plane configuration objects a given size of a CE can support. Although there are no hard limits on these objects, the following are the tested maximum numbers recommended for each size:
Configuration limits
| Category | Resource | Medium | Large | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Networking | L3 routes | 8K | 32K | |
| Networking | Segments | 8 | 64 | |
| Networking | IPsec | 64 | 512 | Inclusive of Site Mesh Group, external connectors, and connections to REs. |
| Load balancing | Load balancers | 256 | 512 |
Runtime limits
| Category | Resource | Medium | Large | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Networking | Flow entries | 128K | 512K | |
| CPUs for L3 processing in L3 performance mode | 4 | 8 | Per CE node. |
Note: The numbers are for a CE Site. The limits remain the same regardless of the number of nodes in the Site.
Advanced Vector Extensions
You must enable AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) on hardware where your CEs are deployed if you're using F5 Distributed Cloud WAF. If you don't enable AVX, you can't use the AI features for F5 Distributed Cloud WAF.