F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

Primary use case for the product is high availability and load sharing of applications to be serviced. Also, it provides application security by use of the Application Security Manager.

It has enabled us to keep a sustainable and supported load balancing platform. This is partly due to Cisco withdrawing a large number of their load balancing products and also related to Microsoft Network Load Balancing not scaling enough to suit our needs.

The most valuable feature is the F5 LTM (Local Traffic Manager). This is the part of the product most organisations will be using most. It provides the core functionality to be able to load balance services and the means and the intelligence to be able to load balance based on advanced logic, e.g., TCL scripting.

The F5 GTM/BIGIP DNS (Global Traffic Manager) is another valuable feature. This feature allows for DNS load balancing, which means that high availability and load sharing can be done across services locally, as well as across datacenters with advanced capabilities.

I would like F5 to incorporate the ability to create your own custom roles and customised permissions within the product set. I have seen many customers wanting to give a certain level of access for the purposes of out-of-hours servicing to out-of-hours staff or teams that fulfill an operations type role.

For example, I would like to see the ability to create roles within F5 where I can specify permissions instead of choosing from a set list that does not always fit my organisation’s needs. The current roles available out-of-the-box do not allow for enough granularity for an operator role to take pool resources offline and push or commit those changes to the configuration/HA cluster. Every role within the F5 that can make changes should be able to commit those changes if the administrator(s) permits.

Stability has never been an issue with F5 BIG-IP. The product is geared predominantly at providing stability and resiliency across your infrastructure.

No issues with scalability have been encountered. I would say that this has largely been due to having a good F5 consultant and consultancy throughout the buying process and implementation. This has ensured that the product being purchased can scale past our current needs and fulfill potential future needs.

I would give a 10 out of 10. Technical support through F5 is very thorough. On most occasions, the F5 DevCentral and support website generally gives you a lot of the expertise that you need without having to raise a support ticket. If you ever reach the stage of needing to raise a support ticket, you usually are handed quickly to someone who is able to deal with your query as efficiently as possible.

Previously, I have used Cisco load balancing, e.g., Cisco CSM, Cisco ACE, Microsoft Network Load Balancing, and Cisco GSS. Previously, Cisco load balancing or Microsoft NLB had always been the preferred options. However, since Cisco discontinued most of their load balancing products, it makes it very difficult to find products of the same grade and functionality. Since we began using F5 that gap in functionality has been filled. With F5, you get not just standard load balancing, but an array of other highly useful products to boot.

The licensing pricing seems relatively easy enough to get your head around. I would advise anyone to ensure that you have a conversation with an F5 consultant before purchasing, as you would with most products. An F5 consultant is the best placed to understand your needs and ensure that you purchase the correct licensing and products for your requirements.

We did evaluate other options. We had already used products such as NetScaler, Microsoft NLB, and a vast array of Cisco load balancing products. F5 was chosen due to the level of power that the product has. I have not seen many single solutions that fulfill all the criteria that an F5 BIG-IP appliance can.

It is not superior to its competitors due to how advanced the features are and the modules that can be used. The product can be used with iRules, which are an advanced ways of making functions available on a load balancer via use of scripting in TCL.

I would strongly advise seeking technical consultation throughout purchasing and during implementation. This is usually because you can get good advice around best practises as well as utilising as much of the F5 features as possible. In some cases, you might even find yourself finding a solution to scenarios that you might not have been aware had a solution.

I rated this product four and a half stars, because of the level of advanced features available in the product versus cost. Though functionality is high, its cost can be considered slightly higher than its competitors.

I used LTM to segment traffic between servers, secure them from deficient connections, and protect them from web attacks and malicious behavior.

F5 LTM supports the application delivery in high-demand scenarios.

F5 is very efficient in the services it provides, whether it's LTM or ASM. The policies and machine learning are one of a kind, efficient, and provide minimal disturbance to the servers.

From an ASM perspective, the most valuable feature was the DOS protection, SQL injection protection, bot protection, bot URLs, and many other features.

There were a lot of good features. The most beneficial for maintaining server health included the algorithms for the virtual IP, which segment traffic between servers, authentication profiles, and many other things.

The load-balancing capabilities have increased efficiency because servers can handle connection requests one at a time. There are no dropped connections, and the server health is always under the threshold.

Moreover, AI enhances LTM's performance in network management. It made it much more secure and efficient by understanding normal traffic patterns and learning the behavior of traffic within the environment. Any suspicious traffic is captured and flagged.

In the LTM solution, it would be beneficial to have more algorithms for traffic segmentation or the ability to create user-defined algorithms rather than being restricted to predefined ones.

I have experience with this product. I used it for years. 

I didn't face any issues with stability. 

It is a scalable product. In some environments that I worked on, it ranged from 1000 to 10,000 normal users. It was deployed across multiple locations with multiple deployments.

I managed LTM for scaling network resources during peak times. If I had multiple servers hosting the same servers, I could segment traffic across these servers during peak times. Rather than going to one server, the traffic can go to two or three servers to ensure fast delivery and keep the servers healthy, even during peak times.

I've used Citrix, but I didn't like it.

F5 was easier to manage and had better performance.

The initial setup was straightforward, with no trouble at all.

• Deployment process: The service I worked on followed best practices. It involved the initial configuration, management configuration, onboarding servers, creating authentication profiles, keep-alive connections, integrating with Active Directory, and applying rules.

• Deployment time: For a huge enterprise environment, it might take about a month to fully deploy it. 

Two to three resources can handle it for a large enterprise.

There is maintenance required. With appropriate training, it can be maintained and administered without any issues.

It's worth every penny. The return on investment is amazing.

It's more expensive than other load-balancing vendors.

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

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.

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.

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.