F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

The solution is mostly used for the LTM load balancer. Recently more of our customers are using it for the web application firewall. Some of my other customers are using the GTM model also. 

My experience in selling this solution is approximately two and a half years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution depends on the sizing of the network. Generally, the scalability is quite good.

The technical support is one of the best I have seen in their field. They have been good so far.

One of the strongest areas of this solution is its ease of install. It did not take more then a couple of hours.

The deployment can take some time because you can do a lot of configuring to meet the needs of the use cases for clients. This will take more time to configure the different areas than just the general install. We typically have two technicians on site doing the deployments.

The solution is quite expensive if we compare it with the competition. For only load balancer, it is too expensive. The license is subscription-based, except for the security model.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP a seven out of ten.

My primary use cases of this solution are as a big IP solution, a WAF solution, EPM, and reverse proxy.

This product has improved our load balance, especially when it comes to using the termination at the A5 level, making us more efficient.

The most valuable features are the WAF and the big IP.

I've been using this solution for over eight years.

This solution is very stable.

My impression is that it's scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it took some time to complete.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

• Load balancing
• Certificate management
• Pooling of services

• Load balancing deployments
• Active pools and standby pools for high availability.

• Load balancing
• Being able to adjust headers. 
• Request response headers. 
• Patching issues in the load balancer that we don't want in the application layer.

Certificate management needs improvement. I would like automated deployment of new certificates without manual intervention to be in the next release of this product.

The product is very stable. We put a decent amount of stress on it given our load.

It seems to be a very scalable product. 

As for the size of our environment, we have our own data center, but it's a small data center.

I would give it a nine out of ten for its stability and feature set, as well as the way it handles our load.

Definitely consider this product on your product evaluation list.

It is the front-end to the cloud for all the services in our data center. So, it sort of integrates with all of our services.

We have yet to integrate it with AWS.

In Vietnam, F5 provides better services.

When I put F5 into my network, it works better. 

The pricing could be improved.

Scalability seems fine.

Technical support was helpful when we contacted them.

The pricing is inclusive of many features.

We evaluated NetScaler. F5 is the better product for our location.

• LTM for balancing
• ASM for WAF

I'm a system integrator, not a customer. Usually F5 meets customer expectations well. It's best of breed and an industry leader.

Security and Reporting.

As a pre-sale engineer, I'm not working with the F5 solution but I'm studying F5's features and competitor benchmarking.

When WAF is enabled, you can see a decrease in performance.

Not to date.

Very good.

Citrix NetScaler. F5 supports better features, from load balancing to security and application visibility. NetScaler is better with a VDI solution.

Not applicable.

F5 is more expensive than other solutions, so you have to be sure F5 is the best solution to fit the requirements.

Citrix, RadWare, and LBL.

You need the right skills to deploy it. Complex deployment requires TCL language knowledge.

We use F5 for the load balancing of our equipment. We use it for DDoS functionalities in our security solution. 

This solution is the best security platform. We have even attached it to another security platform solution for DDoS.

They need to improve the interface and some of the functionalities.

It is very stable. We have not had many problems.

We don't need additional features to grow out the platform.

The occasion in which we needed technical support, we didn't have problems with them, because they always answered our questions without any trouble.

Primary use case is as our main protection. You can use it for brute force and other kinds of cross-site attacks.

It gives us something like a "story" of our status because we can see a lot of bad traffic and, in the logs, if someone is trying to execute something.

Most important is that it stops very common attacks which can be performed by a simple hacker, and up to the advanced level.

We need best-practice information. They have something called DevCentral and a blog. But we want something from F5 itself regarding how to tackle the false-positive configurations. If you go into detail with so many configurations it will find so many false positives from the moment it is enabled that it will quickly impact your applications, and it will not work.

Overall, it's stable. There are cases which are not so much about stability but, rather, about functionality and false positives.

No issues with scalability.

It has many features compared to other products.

We use the solution to offer load balancing to companies and especially for state and government company.

One of the best features of the solution is the operating system. Additionally, it is easy to use and has plenty of features.

The configuration is intricate and could be improved. 

For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud.

The price of the solution is sometimes expensive.

I rate F5 BIG-IP an eight out of ten.