F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

• 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.

The primary use cases are application load balancing and as a web application firewall.

We resell F5 as partners. Our customers have a clear business case to reduce downtime, improving resource utilization.

The major applications that front-end core banking for most banks and Microsoft Exchange were experiencing performance challenges without F5. After front-ending these applications through an application delivery controller with F5, most of the performance issues went away.

It is very intuitive, easy to deploy, and manage.

The solution's capabilities has been most instrumental in supporting our customers. I find it reliable. Once it is configured, and up and running, then there usually is no downtime.

In terms of performance, we have seen a drastic difference without F5, then with it. If you run the same application from users to the server when there wasn't F5, there were delays. With F5, users can see a remarkable performance difference from a qualitative sense.

Implementing whitepapers with a lot more applications could easily be added.

This project is missing some relevant features: 

1. We set up the customer through the load balancer.
2. Then once it is there and functional, then the next step is to add the web application firewall on the same boxes. 

Not with the GA versions. Obviously, the betas are not that stable.

When you enable the web application firewall on the same platform, it requires more resources. If the use case is only for load balancing, but the customers using both load balancing as well as web application firewall, the sizing has to be done correctly.

The technical support is good and up to mark. 

There is a challenge in Pakistan. This is when there is a hardware failure. Sometimes, it takes more time to get a replacement because it is sent out from the U.S. or some other regional outpost. Thus, it takes two to three days to receive a replacement.

A few of our customers were using Brocade, Citrix NetScaler, or A10. We moved them to F5, because there were more customer references available for F5 in our country and the support structure was better.

The initial setup was very straightforward in GUI. It was not complex.

It is the best solution, but that comes with an increased price.

Try to negotiate all the software features that you require upfront. E.g., if you need three different software features and a web application firewall, then try to log the prices initially when you are buying the initial solution, even if you are not buying some of the software but at least log the prices for features.

Our customers normally evaluate others too and shortlist F5 based on ease of use.

It is best of the breed, or best in class. Our experience has been very good, in terms of performance, and securing our application infrastructure.

I strongly recommend the product, but through an experienced partner.

With these type of application delivery controller projects, the application teams have a significant role. It is networking team plus the application team. With better coordination between all the different teams who are engaged, project execution will go more smoothly.

We are using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for all the modules for DNS applications. It is a core product for us.

Since the COVID pandemic hit the whole company has been working remotely. It's improved the remote working by handling the security and the reachability of the company.

The most valuable features are DNS, APM, and ASM. Additionally, it is easy to use and you have a lot of flexibility to use the solution within a network.

The user interface could be improved in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

There's can be some improvements done on the access policy manager(APM) such as supporting APIs and web services.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for approximately eight years.

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

The scalability of the solution is good.

We have approximately 20 engineers using the solution.

The solution is extensively being used and we plan to increase usage.

We use many other solutions in our company.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

We have one engineer that handles the support of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

We have seen an ROI by using this solution.

We are on an annual license to use the solution.

We have evaluated other solutions but we found the scalability and usability to be better in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

I strongly recommend this solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a nine out of ten.

We use it for load balancing and routing.

It supports APIs and virtual additions for cloud and VMware.

It integrates with various firewall and networking devices along with application services, and it works fine.

• Routing
• Load balancing

• Cloud native integration should be provided.
• Native support for containers should be added to future releases, as this is the future of load balancing.

The stability is great. We put our production load on it, which is very stressful.

Scalability has been great. We have thousands of severs. F5 has scaled very well.

They provide average enterprise technical support.

I also evaluated Cisco, but chose F5 because it had better features in terms of load balancing. I liked the various features in F5, including input/output routing, load balancing, and global load balancing.

Explore the API support and integration with the open source products. Those are the key thing to analyze. F5 are the experts in their area.

I use the on-premise version.

Our company is based in different geographical locations and we need to create SD-WANs with tight security while allowing remote access to our resources. To manage that and to manage the whole network, we use BIG-IP.

When we purchased the product, we found it to be a bit expensive.

If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it.

If the price for a cloud-based deployment can be matched with their competitors the I think it would be a far better solution. 

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

BIG-IP is stable and we plan to continue using it. We don't want to change because we're happy with what it's doing unless we switch over to the cloud. I think that cloud sizing is too heavy.

This is a scalable product. There are three people who manage it, but it's applicable to the entire organization, so there are approximately 1,500 users.

I think that technical support is pretty good. On a scale of one to ten, I can reasonably score them a nine.

The implementation and deployment happened before I joined the company, although I have reviewed the procedure and did not find anything challenging when it came to installation. Once you understand how to work with the product, it is easy to manage the services.

Our in-house team takes care of the maintenance. There are three people who manage it, and once every three months, we spend 30 or 40 minutes reading and clearing up the logs.

I don't think that this product really provides value for the money. However, what you get for the cost is satisfactory. It's not like I won the lottery. This is a solution that does what it's supposed to do at the price point.

When we purchased additional licenses for our other locations, we received a discount of between 20% and 25%. My understanding is that they matched the competitor's price.

If we move all of our on-premises systems onto the cloud, we will probably look for another solution. We may rely on the cloud provider for this. 

We have not felt the need to upgrade to the most recent version or do any updates on this product because we're pretty happy with what we have.

Overall, this is a good product and if one can afford it, then I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. 

We use it for a number of solutions that we build, mostly for identity and access management control.

It is the centerpiece of a lot of the solutions that we build, and it has integrated with everything that we have needed it to.

It is the best value for our engineers and architects who know how to use it. It meets the government's requirements every time that we've used it. It is easy for us to keep integrating with our solutions.

We have found the consistency of the application always being the way it is supposed to be as its most valuable feature.

We put a lot of stress on the application. It is very stable.

The scalability is awesome. Our environment is thousands upon thousands of instances in AWS.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was very simple. The main reason that we went this way was the simplicity of buying it there. It is maintained and upgraded for us, and this makes it easy to stay current.

While the licensing is good through the AWS Marketplace, it is more expensive than what you could buy yourself. However, the convenience outweighs the price.

LTM.

We can load balance the request to servers, which was the main reason we bought the product.

I think the logging could be improved.

Two years.

No.

No.

I have never used F5 technical support.

No.

No, it was simple.

Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing.

No, straight to F5.

Stable product. It also offers a virtual edition which comes in handy if you have a VMware environment.