F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

For my clients, the primary use cases include load balancing, both for server and link load balancing.

We have used it to link two or three servers and make them communicable from outside. It works well as a load balancer.

There is room for improvement in terms of stability. The F5 BIG-IP LTM allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single appliance. However, if one of those virtual portions fails, it can cause issues and impact the overall stability of the solution.

I have been working with this solution for four years. I have worked with F5 as a system integrator, partner, and MSP.

It is a stable solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten. Rather than having separate appliances for each virtual machine, the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) allows multiple virtual machines to run on one appliance. However, if one of those virtual portions is no longer available, it can cause issues.

It is scalable. I would say it's around eight or nine out of ten. Our clients are at the enterprise level. 

The customer service and support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup is easy. I would rate the initial installation a nine out of ten, one being very difficult and ten being very easy.

We installed the solution in a web-based environment and have implemented it in two data centers, one located in New Jersey and the other in a different location. We have used F5 for both firewall load balancing and link load balancing. We have two sets of F5 deployed at each location. 

We completed the installation within a week with the help of a team of five people. At present, a team of five is managing and maintaining the solution in the data center and for the local portion.

It is cheaper than the average on the market. I would rate it as a five since it is in the middle range, with ten being the most expensive. It is good, and the price is reasonable. 
Moreover, I have only worked on five or six devices and have not dealt with licensing rules. However, in my previous job as a system integrator, I did work on local installations, which were relatively quick and inexpensive.

In my opinion, the Radware product is also good. F5 and Alteon products are equally good, so I would rate them an eight.

I would recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it for low balancing.

It has been in our environment for four to five years, but I have only been using it for a little over a year.

• The detail that you have available when setting up iRules. 
• How the traffic routing works in F5.

The management process seems a bit difficult. 

The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface.

For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs. However, this is more an implementation detail than an F5 detail.

It is very stable. I have no concerns regarding stability for F5.

We are seasonal, so we go from low to high volumes. F5 has never been a concern of ours for stability.

We run an Active-Active version of two instances, so scalability between the on-premise and AWS versions hasn't been a huge issue for us. Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot.

We have support agreements in place, but they are managed by the infrastructure team. I do not contact the technical support, they do.

The integration and configuration into the AWS environment was pretty good.

The product was already in place when I came onboard.

My preference is to use AWS natively, but there are some issues around session management and so on, which have prevented us from using it. While a lot of these issues have been solved, a lot of our applications are tied to the F5 infrastructure.

Always use the Automatic Synching between F5. Don't try to use the API to do the synching. This is where we went wrong. We were trying to push the nodes to F5 individually instead of letting F5 handle the synchronization process, and it doesn't work.

We were previously using the on-premise version, but now we are using the AWS version. They are about the same as far as functionality.

We’re a systems integration company. We propose this solution mostly to our banking customers and large enterprise clients, so that they can load-balance their core banking applications and their main applications.

It also provides proxying, the client cannot directly access the server. BIG-IP is a proxy between the user and the server, so the client cannot make connections directly to servers. They land on F5 BIG-IP and then F5 creates connections on servers on behalf of clients.

We use the solution for smarter, safer, and reliable connectivity.

It has multi-tenancy features, like hardware clustering. It has software partitioning so that you can partition F5. For example, in my recent deployments, I deployed F5 in a bank where they had two load balancers. One was Cisco Ace and the other was Citrix Netscaler.

We created two instances, two vCMP Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing, two hardware partitions in F5, one for Ace and one for Citrix. We migrated all applications which were on Ace to the Ace partition, and we migrated all applications which were on Citrix to the Citrix partition. Further, we created the outgoing internet and software partitions, and it has application visibility, reporting functions.

It has so many features. First of all, it has a full proxy architecture, it has multiple modules. The best feature is the WAF, the web application firewall module. It also has cashing type capabilities. It has all kinds of load-balancing algorithms based on your IT requirements.

So the WAF and load balancing. Both are core features of BIG-IP.

In every environment, you have a Web application firewall, you have internet firewalls. Then, traffic comes into your datacenter so that you have datacenter firewalls. F5 has everything.

It provides first-tier firewalling, for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, it provides optimization, and it provides a proxy feature, where your users cannot directly access your server. It acts as a fully proxy architecture. It has client-side and server-side connections, both, and they're separate.

It also has an AVR feature: application, visibility, and recording. It's good for customers looking for what is actually happening in their network and where the latency is. If I'm using iDirect, the bank branch is connecting to my core banking application, but if the clients are finding that the application is slow, it has TCP  LAN and WAN optimization features. It has has caching.

The room for improvement is that the product is a little costly. I live in the Third World, Pakistan. We have budget constraints, even in big enterprise servers. My team said that this product is too costly, and why don't we go with another product, we should do a comparative analysis with Citrix and F5.

I told them that is costly, but it has rich features, the support is good, the features are reliable, and the technical assistance center, the tech support, is almost perfect.

Still, I would say they need to cut their prices for countries or regions that we live in.

The one gap I saw was that pure LBN integration is a little tricky. The insertion of F5 in LBN is a little tricky. They need to work on something, on products by which they can insert F5 in any sort of cloud environment. These are not really big things. 

They are continuously improving. They are improving day by day, and they are the number-one load balancer.

It is a stable product. It runs on TMOS, traffic management operating system. This is very stable. 

If they see that an upgrade required, they provide you the release and they provide you the release notes, so you can upgrade your TMOS version and at any time. You can also open a case and they can guide you on how to upgrade your TMOS version.

They also keep an eye on vulnerability. If there is a bug or any sort of vulnerability in their operating system, they will immediately release an update. So the product is so much more stable compared to any load balancers on the planet at the moment.

It has that scalability for adding more F5, N + 1. 

It's scalable, and it has more functions than a service. At the same time, this device can run access policy manager, it has Web application firewall, datacenter switching to DR sites. It has a modular approach actually. It gives you what you want.

They are very professional. They are highly skilled people.

It is neither simple nor complex. It all depends on what kind of situations you are in. My last deployment was a little bit complex but previous deployments were very simple.

We did hardware partitioning and software partitioning for a multi-tenancy concept, where every application owner has its own load balancing instance within F5. So it all depends on how you deploy a device and it depends on your planning.

If you want a simple deployment you can do so. You can create multiple virtual servers on F5 BIG-IP technology, and within multiple virtual servers you can have multiple nodes, where a node equals two application servers.

It can be deployed in a complex manner and it can be deployed in a very simple manner, it all depends on your choice. 

It has a rapid deployment feature to deploy Microsoft Exchange load balancing. It has automation. You can simply click on Microsoft Exchange 2016 Email Server. Tclick on it and tell F5 about server IPs, and it goes automatically. 

 24 x 7 always on applications without any down time. 

Brocade ADX.

F5 is the number-one application delivery controller, plus they are the number-one Web application firewall, together in the market right now. So what else do you want from them? Whenever we go and pitch this solution to our customers, we tell them that we are not selling you just a load balancer. We are selling you application delivery controllers, and Web application firewalls.

I give it 9.5 out of 10. It's a really costly product and smaller organizations cannot afford this solution, so it's hard to sell a plan. But once the customer has it, this product is a 10.

I use the tool as a load balancer to distribute user traffic across different servers. It is used for scalability purposes. Depending on the amount of traffic that comes in, I can send that traffic to different servers and load-balance it. Also, the web application firewall protects our servers and applications from cyberattacks.

The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is that it allows you to manipulate things. Now, manipulation here is in the sense that you can do whatever you want to do in the solution using something called iRule, which is a programming interface for F5. So, this is something I find to be extremely useful when compared to other vendors.

Based on my experience using F5 and by only taking into consideration the last seven years, I have found that the reporting mechanism is bad. F5 seems to prioritize its core functions and has not placed a strong emphasis on logging and reporting. I say that the reporting is bad based on my experiences and after considering the requests from customers over the past 11 years. They often ask for specific reports and information that are not available from the devices.

I want the response from tech support to get faster.

I have worked for almost 11 years with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.

The solution's stability is pretty good.

I handle almost a hundred-plus customers who are using this solution. The solution comes in different form factors. The high-end models are scalable owing to their ability to cater to certain requirements. So, since there are different models available, the solution is scalable.

I am not happy with the tech support. If I compare it with Fortinet, it is not great. Though I am able to connect over a call with the tech team, it is very difficult to get the right engineer at the right time. When it comes to Fortinet, you get the right person to help you at the right time.

While the initial setup of the tool is easy and straightforward, the complexity of onboarding each application can vary and depends on the specific application being used. Also, since I have been working on F5 for about 11 years, it may take me a day to deploy the whole setup.

I am not aware of the exact cost of the product. However, it is expensive. The pricing can either be on a yearly or monthly subscription basis, and this choice is left to the customer's discretion. The product also includes a basic hardware support guarantee and subscription-based services, which can affect the overall cost.

People need to have a basic understanding of HTTP and SSF. Additionally, this device is not solely a networking device but rather a solution that operates as an application device. Therefore, knowledge of applications, programming, and related fields is essential. I just mean to say that the people who are planning to use this solution should not only have a background in networking but also should possess some application programming knowledge. I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our engineers use various products from the F5 BIG-IP range when creating application solutions. Primarily, we make use of F5 BIG-IP's ASM (Application Security Manager) and WAF (Web Application Firewall). For most of our applications, we require that our servers, and server-related software, are hosted in virtual machine environments.

In my team, we work in a very agile environment and the solutions from BIG-IP, including BIG-IP WAF, suit us well when developing and serving our applications.

I am happy with most of the features made available to us through BIG-IP's software and I enjoy using the interfaces (dashboards, etc.). 

There are some aspects of F5 BIG-IP that could be improved, the main one being virtual machine support. We have seen that even with the virtual editions, there are some things that we would like to do that are currently not possible with virtual machines.

We have seen some problems mainly with F5 BIG-IP ASM, and so I think the virtual editions of the ASM could be improved.

Another negative aspect is the cost, as it can be expensive.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP for five years now. 

As far as I can tell, it's a stable and secure solution. 

Although BIG-IP's solutions are scalable for most purposes, it's not always scalable for certain scenarios, in my opinion. From an API perspective, though, it is quite scalable.

We have used F5 BIG-IP's technical support and it is very good. 

The initial setup is very easy. Very, very easy. Especially for the web guys. 

F5 BIG-IP can be expensive, although there are trial versions available which are helpful to find out if the solution is right for your company.

We have been considering using Nginx as an alternative or complementary solution to our application delivery and security needs, but we have not pursued this option further at this point.

For the most part, we are looking for a solution that has better support for virtual machines, and Nginx is one alternative we have looked at because of its good virtual machine support. 

I would rate F5 BIG-IP a five out of ten.

We mainly use the following F5 modules 

ISP environments:

• CGNAT
• DNS firewall
• Load balancer
• WAF to be sold as a service to their clients

Enterprise environments:

• Web application firewall
• Load balancer
• Application policy manager
• Fraud protection (Web and mobile)
• DDoS (on-premise, and cloud-based)

iRule: It's a great feature that helped us multiple times have an advantage over competition (during PoCs) performing some traffic control/management functions that are not supported out of the box. Use Case: One client was deploying a new web app, where video/chat Traffic is configured over the SOCKS protocol. We used iRule to disable the WAF Inspection when a SOCKS protocol packet passed through (because it is not supported), and enable the WAF Inspection for all other URLs on the same Web page. (No other vendor in our region was able to provide that.)

Appliance Performance: One of the main advantages we always have over competition is in hardware performance, where the smallest F5 appliances compete with competitors’ medium to high-end appliances, while high-end devices can sit in the datacenter without risking performance degradation.

• Reporting: One of the negative things about F5 is there is no place to generate a summary/executive/detailed report about everything happening on the box, especially for WAF & APM events. The only way to get some kind of report is enable the AVR module, and manually export the data required into PDF/XLS documents.
• GUI interface: F5 appliances lack a standard dashboard page, where it shows a summary for all events on the boxes. (This is usually available with firewalls & IPSs...) In the F5 GUI, we have to perform multiple steps to reach the required info, but there is no simple (and attractive) GUI interface when compared to some other WAF competitors.
• Event notifications

I have not encountered any stability issues. It is a very stable product, even in big, high-load deployments. What I mean is that all F5 Hardware appliances are very stable and does not cause any performance degradation or failure when it has a high load (Of course a supported load).

We have deployment for different modules of F5 (LTM, ASM, CGNAT...) in Data Centers and in Telco's Public network, and we have never heard any complaints or of issues from our clients regarding the performance. - no packet drops, delays or disconnections.

We only encountered issues with small appliances, 2000s, when we needed to add more than two modules...

Technical support is great.

We previously used Cisco ACE (for load balancing & WAF). We switched because the Cisco ACE solution features were very basic compared to F5. Plus, the solutions line was discontinued several years ago.

Initial setup is straightforward; easy deployment with lots of available online documentation.

F5 Prices are considered higher then competitive solutions, but performance & features are worth the extra money.

Over our year of engagement with F5, we evaluated multiple products from other vendors and competed with many others, and we always found F5 products to be our first and best choice to advise our customers to use, with respect to:

• Performance, protection, stability, scalability
• Being modular based, for a better long term investment

F5 is dedicated to a specific technology line, which makes it the best of breed in the application delivery market. F5's main business is always focused on application delivery, whether in availability, security, or performance.

F5 is a very stable and recommended product, whether needed on the internet edge or inside the data center. It can provide different application delivery solutions, such as:

• Load balancing
• Web application firewall
• Access policy manager
• Web fraud
• DDoS protection.

I rate it nine out of 10 because we are an F5 partner, and we have been selling and deploying different F5 modules for different industry vectors. In any deployment we always had a great customer experience, mainly in the following areas:

• performance stability 
• overall stability
• rich features in the appliances, that customers can benefit from.

It's a modular-based appliance. You can double the performance specs by a license upgrade, and regarding features you can add a license for additional modules (E.g.: Web application firewall, application policy manager, fraud, DDoS). In general, for a client doing a proper ROI over five years, F5 appliances become their preferred choice.

All the cyber security vendors and their products need improvement, including F5 and this product. No one is 100% secured, because attacks are more sophisticated now, and the hackers have become more advanced.

Recently, I've seen one of the attacks on this particular network, where they managed to bypass its multi-factor authentication. They were able to bypass that level of security, and they managed to get into the network.

Every cyber security vendor needs to be proactive. No one is perfect, so even the rank one cyber security vendors should also keep their eyes open all the time.

It would also be better if F5 provided free product training for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), so end customers could have more awareness and understanding of the product, so they'll know how to use it.

Our level of requirements, usage, and scalability are being met by this product. If we needed additional features, or if we needed additional licenses, all we need to do is just buy the additional features or licenses, so we currently don't have any additional features we'd like to be included in the next version of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

My experience with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a total of four years now. We have customers, e.g. from the government, who prefer this solution. We also propose it to them because they have a bigger environment, compared to the environment size of private companies. We have customers from the government, e.g. from the Department of Communication.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is scalable and secure, so we propose this solution to customers with bigger environments, e.g. those in the government.

I'm rating F5 technical support a nine out of ten.

We used Fortinet, but what we were getting from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was always more than what we got from Fortinet, even when using FortiWeb and Forti WAF cloud as a service, and even when considering the functionality of each product.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is more complex to implement. Implementation of this product would be much easier if you have the right service, e.g. consultation services included, support from the distributor or directly from the vendor itself, or a certified partner. Having consultation and support will help make it much easier for the end customer during implementation, but the implementation process for this product is more complex than Fortinet.

The cost is high for this product, so small customers, e.g. those in a private bank, won't be able to afford F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), and they also don't really need the kind of support and functionality that this product gives.

For customers who are in the government, we propose F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) despite its cost being high, because they'll really need it. They host their applications in the cloud, and in private data centers, e.g. private cloud services, so they'll need the kind of protection that this product provides.

It depends on customer. Whenever we see that customers can't afford, or the environment is smaller, we propose Fortinet, or some other solution that's cheaper than Fortinet. We don't propose F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to them.

I was able to evaluate Fortinet.

We have a partnership with Fortinet, as a reseller of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and other F5 products. We are also a reseller of Cisco and Forcepoint products, though we just started with Forcepoint, so we haven't been doing much with their products currently.

My advice to users of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), including people who are thinking of implementing this product, is that they need to have product awareness. What we are seeing in our government customers is that they don't have awareness, in particular, they don't know what they're using, which is why they're having issues. They need to understand the product first, and they need to go and get the training first, but they are hesitant to pay for the training.

Unlike Fortinet who provides free training, F5 doesn't. Ever since the pandemic, Fortinet has provided free training, but certification is not free. If F5 can provide free training for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), that would be better.

My rating for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is eight out of ten.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to balance traffic. 

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is expensive. Pricing needs to be improved. 

I have been using the solution for five to eight years. 

The solution is stable. 

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

I rate the product a ten out of ten.