F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

Central solution to control traffic or web applications (besides NG Firewall).

• Easy administration
• A lot of features
• Scriptable (iRules and REST API)

I have some experience with other load balancing providers. The BIG-IP’s interface is more intuitive than other GUIs. It is well structured, not overloaded, and does not have too many gimmicks.

The ASM administration is quite complex. I am a technical GUI expert (not UI). They did improve the ASM administration in each version, but added new features, too. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas.

I have not yet encountered any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good. I have had nothing to complain about up until now.

I previously used a different solution. We switched because the hardware was too old, and the other vendor did not have the same set of features.

Initial setup was straightforward. We were up and running in three hours.

Take a look at the modules that you are going to use. Look into the best bundles for them.

Before choosing this product, I compared it with Radware. Cisco was already off the market, and Citrix was not as big as it is today.

Use the community and DevCentral.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for the web application firewall and a load balancing system. We are using it in a government project.

There are not very many areas for improvement, but the price is high.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately four months.

I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to be stable.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a scalable solution.

We have approximately nine people using this solution in my organization.

We have only opened up two support tickets with the support and on both occasions, they provided a good service.

The initial setup of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was complex and could be made easier. The full process took approximately three weeks.

We used consultants for the implementation of the solution. 

We have 10 to 12 managers supporting this solution.

The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) a seven out of ten.

All of our web servers are load-balanced by F5.

The iRule feature is very useful for inspecting HTTP. Sometimes, we use it for modifying the headers of the HTTP.

F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud.

Recently, we were investigating offloading SSL as version TLS 1.3. I am not sure if we were able to do that or not.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

It is very stable.

They have a host where you can increase the CPUs dedicated for load balancing. You can mount a cluster to escalate, but in order to escalate, you need to virtualize the solution. Otherwise, you need to change the device and load something bigger.

I contacted them in the past. They provide good support.

I have used a Cisco solution in the past, but they discontinued the solution or the hardware. F5 is much better.

It is very easy. It depends a bit on what you want, but in one day or two days, you can have F5 load balancing on backend servers. It is very easy.

I would recommend others to choose a virtualized solution. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

The primary use case includes load balancing to serve application servers and basic web application firewall solutions. Our customers use it for that purpose.

It takes the load off the application servers allowing them to operate efficiently.

The solution is trusted as it has too many customers and has been in operation for many years, enabling users to feel comfortable and perform at a high level. 

Additionally, features such as SSL offloading, various balancing methods, and the ability to work with HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP protocols are beneficial. Another feature of note is its high stability and reliable performance.

There are no specific areas for improvement as it is already well-resolved and doesn't require further enhancements.

I have been using the BIG-IP LTM solution for almost two years.

The solution is highly stable and reliable.

With the new version, the solution is scalable.

The technical support team is really good.

Positive

The setup is a little bit complex. That said, the documentation is helpful.

I am a part of the implementation team.

The solution brings a significant return on investment as it allows the use of many servers with high performance.

The pricing should be more flexible.

I recommend F5 BIG-IP LTM because it works stably, the support is good, and the local team is helpful.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Currently, we use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager as our traffic management solution. As a consultant, it is project-based with my clients rather than hands-on. Our clients use the solution to load balance their current application server in the DMZ and also in the data center.

The most valuable feature of the F5 BIG-IP LTM solution is load balancing.

To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP LTM for two years.

F5 BIG-IP is a stable solution. It is quite mature and does not have many concerns.

Scalability is good. We use it for active and passive, and we also do some TCMP.

I would rate technical support a four out of five. Their support is quite good, however, they could be a bit more responsive and react faster to requests.

Positive

The biggest concern for my clients is the pricing.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP, we compared the product with other vendors. We chose F5 BIG because of its technical support as well as its documentation. Their knowledge base is easy to read and access to information is available on their website. It is a complete product for an ADC solution. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten and recommend this solution to users that are looking to use it.

We are using it for web application firewall and load balancing features. We have its latest version.

It is stable.

Its scalability and deployment should be better. It should be more scalable, and it should be easier to deploy.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

It is stable.

It is not scalable. We have about 2,000 users in our organization.

I don't have any experience with their technical support.

We didn't use any other product.

It is neither easy nor complex. It needs experience. Fortinet is easier to deploy than this.

I did it myself. We have an IT team of 60 people.

I would recommend this solution. We plan to keep using it. 

I would rate F5 BIG-IP an eight out of ten.

The anti-bot protection is very good. They are able to see bots from their system quite well. It has helped our customers to filter real traffic from fake and allows the real traffic to access the application. With the profile provided, you can block many new scans and scripts that are constantly generating traffic to their web service.

When you create an autofile, its profile takes a long time to generate the view in the VIP. That is probably due to the performance of the device, however, when you load a specific profile, the browser takes more than one minute to show the information. 

The web interface could be better.

The solution should allow for the creation of custom signatures. Right now, I see that can be a little bit complicated to create new or personal signatures in the VIP.

The way that policies are created should make it easier to maintain the solution. 

The product needs to implement some kind of artificial intelligence or machine learning that can start to generate fewer false positive requests. We tend to have a lot of false positives. The policy should be created in such a way as to help lower false positives.

There should be better reporting. Our customers ask us for reports quite often. It would be ideal if the solution itself was able to generate various types of reports for them instead. 

I've been working with the solution since 2014.

This year, we had a couple of issues. We found some bugs in version 15. They are very good, however, at finding the issue and generating a hotfix quickly so that we can apply the hotfix to the device. In the general, I would say that version 15 has been very stable overall.

Whether you can scale easily or not depends on the device and the sizing. For example, if you have an E 2000 or I 4000, you might have a lot of traffic and the device cannot handle it very well. Scalability with the performance was the one issue that affected us this year.

Most of the customers that we have are enterprises. They are banking and insurance customers. They're quite large, which is why we need the scalability that we do.

We always use technical support and the team helps us very well. They're able to effectively find and fix issues and they respond very quickly. We're quite satisfied with their level of service overall.

We also work with Palo Alto firewalls. I've worked with Check Point as well.

The initial setup is not too complex. It's pretty straightforward.

It's straightforward to create a new policy or a new postulate or a new deployment. It takes a couple of minutes to create a new deployment and it's rather easy to do so.

We're a reseller for Enterprise companies such as Banking and Retail.

I'd advise that if a customer wants to implement this product, that they find a partner they can have a strong relationship with. The partner needs to be able to effectively implement the product and train your staff on the proper usage. That is, of course, if the client wants to manage it themselves in the long run.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. If they could improve their web interface, generate reports, and have all the configuration on a single page on the platform, I'd rank it a bit higher.

We use it as a load balancer.

We have always used it and never had any issues with it.

The most valuable feature is being able to manipulate the iRules, so you can send traffic to different avenues.

The auto logout feature after three minutes is terrible. I wish they would make that longer, since it is not a feature that we can change.

It contributes to our traffic by about fifty percent. That's why we love it. We have never had any issues.

We put a lot of stress on our F5 on-premise. We have support, which is great. It is a ten out of ten.

We have over 12 applications that we use it for with about 300 servers which are connected up using this load balancer. 

We're a big company. We do like the on-premise version. However, we are looking into AWS servers to help us scale for larger avenues as well.

We reached out to the technical support a few times, and they are great. They are a ten out of ten.

The integration and configuration are great. When I need to make changes, I have been fine.

We are currently using the Terraform Infrastructure as Code. Therefore, we are using the F5 provider to create new nodes, pools, and purchase servers, and the integration has been seamless for us.

We are going to the AWS Marketplace because purchasing there is simple to do. We are looking for the ease it provides. We have tried other providers, but it wasn't as good.

We did not evaluate anything else.

Take advantage of it and use it.

We use the on-premise version of this product. We are looking into moving over to the AWS version.