F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We use the solution as a proxy to our websites, load balancing all our servers as clients come onto our website and use our services. Our website provides around 15 different services. We are customers of F5 and I'm a solutions architect for telecom and network infrastructure.

The load balancing aspect is valuable to us. 

We use a limited amount of features so the biggest issue for us is the price. For what we're using, it's an expensive solution. 

We've been using this solution for 12 years. 

The solution is very stable and scales easily. Our networking team deals with the maintenance.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We had external help for implementation and I believe deployment took about two days. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use it as an LTM and as a reverse proxy to publish web services.

It helps us recognize sessions from certain IPs that are authorized to manage the application. This is a function we haven't found anywhere else.

The most helpful thing is that it's open-source. It's very easy to program and customize.

Logging is a bit of a problem. Logging and monitoring are only in plain text. You have to search and you have to know what you are searching for to find anything. So of course, monitoring and getting alerts for abnormal situations is hard. There are no tools for monitoring and alerts. If you have problems and you need to diagnose them, you really have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.

Logging and monitoring could be something out-of-the-box that are more accessible.

Stability is one of the advantages. It's very stable.

We haven't bumped into scalability issues. The limitation is actually through licensing. Throughput is limited by licensing. We had an error with the license and we reached the limit but we fixed that. But there has never been trouble with the capacity or scalability.

I have never used technical support directly. I use F5 through integration services and there were a few times they didn't know how to resolve an issue and they had to turn to support. But there were answers every time.

We used Microsoft Gateway called CMG. This product was end-of-life, they decided to kill the product. We switched because there is no other solution that does the same thing.

It was complex compared to the Microsoft system. But after we learned the product and understood how it works, it worked seamlessly.

We only use a fraction of the capabilities of F5. There are different modules that we have heard others speak highly of, but we don't want to use them locally. It's an on-premise server. For example, there is a WAF (web application firewall) model and others that we don't use. 

It's not a cheap product, but there are no other replacements for what we do with it.

We checked other options, but nothing could deliver the solution we need.

I would advise excessive testing before moving to production. It's a new product, it's a "language." You have to learn the product thoroughly before you really can implement it.

GTM and LTM are the primary uses of the solution. Our company has two active data centers and a data center that is being activated. F5 BIG-IP helps us a lot. 

Global DNS, Link Controller, and Server Load Balancer provide our company service with high availability.

Valuable features include Link Controller and Server Load Balancer with cloud support and application enhancement security.

Internet and cloud support could be improved. Security enhancement should be more user friendly.

Previously we had an IdP on a Linux server. However, this was a pain to configure. With the F5 this has become easy. Therefore, more and more of our applications are now transferred to SAML.

I really like the ease of use of it in general. If I were to choose one in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool.

The SharePoint SSO part has some room for improvement. Opening documents and spreadsheets on local applications in on our specific situation is not possible.

None at all.

No issues with scalability.

F5 is a big company. They have a great community and TAC. The advantage with this product is that it isn't new. They have many engineers who have been working with it for a long time and have a lot of experience.

We used to have a Barracuda WAF. It was unreliable and it didn’t have all the features of the F5. It was out of maintenance and we decided never to use Barracuda again.

Easy switch from our Barracuda to F5. The setup was done with an engineer. However, if you pay good attention you can manage it afterwards. I also have a F5 test environment on a VM. These cost around $100 but are worth that money for testing purposes.

We tried FortiADC briefly. However the big contender was Citrix NetScaler.

Be sure of what you will use. F5 isn’t cheap but is worth the price. Also, take a good look at all the different options and make sure you take the correct hardware platform. You can always add more licenses, but if the physical device isn’t up to the task you’re stuck.

Mostly I support my clients in relation to the product.

I am very satisfied with the product overall. 

There is never a big number of false positives or false negatives. That's the most valuable aspect of the product. 

The solution is very easy to use and easy to understand. It's quite an intuitive system.

The user interface and GUI are very good.

I find the product to be very stable. I've supported customers for two years and haven't really had an issue with the solution.

I can't say that there are any features missing. I've overall been quite happy with it.

We once had an issue related to trying to publish some exchange application to a file and we experienced some problems there, however, the incident was not really related to BIG-IP. It was likely some kind of infrastructure problem the company was experiencing.

We haven't had any big problems of note.

Technical support could be faster. It's something I'd like to see them work on in the future.

The pricing could be more reasonable.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point. 

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had an issue in years. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good. It's reliable.

Most of our clients are medium-sized entities.

For the one customer I typically deal with, there has been no need to scale or expand services. The product can be scaled by adding more licenses if necessary. That said, our clients have everything they need and have not actually done this. 

There are also add-ons that come from the ASM if a company is interested in that.

Technical support is slow and it could be faster. I had one issue once that was not very serious as it was on the Disaster Recovery Site. We were able to pull a previous version from a snapshot. However, the issue was that I was able to solve the problem myself before I even heard back from technical support. If they knew their technology, how is it that I could solve the problem faster as a person that's not as familiar with it? They need to be much faster. It could have been a much bigger problem. 

I'd say, overall, we aren't satisfied with the technical support for that reason.

I did not previously use a different product. This is my first Application Delivery Consult Solution.

The initial setup is very complex. The basic setup may be fine, however, right now I'm trying to do something in my lab environment. We've tried a few things over the years and it hasn't gotten any easier.

The costs could be lower. In a report, we found that Citrix Solutions are somehow cheaper - including in relation to encryption licensing. I cannot compare as I haven't spoken to Citrix. I don't know if it's easier or has the same (or more features). That said, I wouldn't describe this product as cheap. 

We're currently comparing F5 to Citrix. I'm not currently working with Citrix; I'm curious to see how they compare to each other. I had a presentation to a client and they just wanted some sort of comparison, which is why I began to look at Citrix.

We are resellers.

I'm a System Integrator. I have experience in virtual environments and with clients. I have some moderate experience with implementation and some bigger experience in supporting this product. I'm not an expert in the field, however, I'm trying to be.

I don't have any issues with the solution. It's pretty problem-free in general. Overall, I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

The load balancing is very good.

The tech support is helpful and knowledgeable.

Everything is okay within the solution. It works well.

The product offers pretty good security.

The solution is easy to install. It's a straightforward process.

The interface is excellent.

We've found the product overall to be simple and easy to use.

Currently, the product offers everything we need. I can't recall any features that may be lacking.

I've only used the solution for one year. In comparison, I've used Radware for three years.

We've had the solution installed for a year now and it is working as it should. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find it stable and reliable. It's been a good experience so far.

The product can scale quite well. We haven't had any issues. If a company needs to expand it out, they should be able to do so without trouble.

Right now, I'm the only one at the office who uses the product.

I've been in contact with technical support in the past. So far, I've been happy with their level of service. They have been very helpful and responsive overall. I don't have any complaints.

We also use Radware, which we've used a bit longer.

The initial setup isn't too complex. We can handle the process pretty well. It's straightforward. I consider it to be pretty easy. There's no difficulties during the instllation.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using right now. I have a few customers who are using it, and they may be using different solutions.

I'd recommend the solution. Our customers seem to be very happy with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

• Great load balancing
• Solid OS
• Great support

Far superior to DNS Round-Robin load balancing; great HTTP and HTTPs redirection.

Fixing bugs.

About 11 years, I believe.

Older OS releases may have had some bugs (active/active on reboot, I think we saw on one OS version). Very stable OS over all. We had one issue on our upgrade to 11.x where I had to engage F5 support. But they resolved it.

No.

Excellent.

No.

Pretty straightforward. The first generation of Big-IP we had, we did a crossover heartbeat cable, but our current one just uses a switched network.

Great product for the money. But they can get really expensive, so get what meets your needs. They do have some expensive extras like GTM, which has both hardware and licensing costs for multiple datacenters.

Citrix, NetScaler.

Check with your IT staff and developers and agree on your needs, and buy accordingly. VM instances are now also available. They don’t have an end-to-end analytics package yet (supposedly in development), to troubleshoot users' experience to the back end nodes. (Citrix offers a product called MAS).

iRules are so helpful in meeting our complex application’s architecture in case of routing. The requests have to be routed according to the cookies and headers of the host name itself. And also we can log the details, which helps us a lot in troubleshooting.

Using the “repeat” option when creating multiple virtual servers, we are able to create as many virtual IPs as we can as we go. This reduces a lot of configuration time.

My organization has various kinds of routing requirements and we have achieved it using F5’s iRules. Also with different load balancing options, many applications have benefited a lot.

Active-Standby sync has to be made automatic.

All of the F5 boxes have an Active-Standby configuration. Users need to make changes in the Active box, but often users by mistake make changes in the Standby box. This creates problems when syncing between Active and Standby. There should be some indication from the F5 tool to avoid such mistakes.

I have used it for the past year.

All of the support I require is available on the internet.

The BigIP F5 tool is applicable to all types of infrastructure. I would recommend this tool to others.