I used LTM to segment traffic between servers, secure them from deficient connections, and protect them from web attacks and malicious behavior.
Information Security Consultant-Risk at a computer retailer with 11-50 employees
Policies and machine learning are one of a kind, efficient, and provide minimal disturbance to the servers
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
Buyer's Guide
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have experience with this product. I used it for years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I didn't face any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've used Citrix, but I didn't like it.
F5 was easier to manage and had better performance.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
It's worth every penny. The return on investment is amazing.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's more expensive than other load-balancing vendors.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jun 6, 2024
Flag as inappropriateManager | Engineering | Cloud Managed Services at Sify Technologies
The product is secure, robust, and reliable, but it is very expensive
Pros and Cons
- "The solution is robust and reliable."
- "The product is expensive."
What is our primary use case?
We are using the solution for our internal and client purposes. We are a cloud service provider.
What is most valuable?
The solution provides good application delivery and network optimization features. We use all the features provided by the solution. It fulfills our requirements. All our infrastructure is set up with high availability through hardware and virtualization in all flavors and levels based on the customer requirements.
What needs improvement?
The pricing must be more flexible. We get billed for firewalls based on the usage. It will be helpful if the solution provides such flexibility.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for many years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool is scalable. It meets the requirements.
How are customer service and support?
We have contacted the technical support team. The team is customer-friendly and knowledgeable.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes just one minute because we use scripts. We need one technical person for the deployment.
What was our ROI?
The solution is robust and reliable. It provides us with security.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The product is expensive. We pay a yearly licensing fee.
What other advice do I have?
We recommend the product to others. It is scalable and reliable. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Buyer's Guide
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Sr. Security Specialist at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Accommodates enterprise-level scalability and easy initial setup
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup is easy."
- "If one virtual portion is unavailable, it can cause issues."
What is our primary use case?
For my clients, the primary use cases include load balancing, both for server and link load balancing.
What is most valuable?
We have used it to link two or three servers and make them communicable from outside. It works well as a load balancer.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with this solution for four years. I have worked with F5 as a system integrator, partner, and MSP.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. I would say it's around eight or nine out of ten. Our clients are at the enterprise level.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In my opinion, the Radware product is also good. F5 and Alteon products are equally good, so I would rate them an eight.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP (Managed Service Provider)
Technical Solutions Architect at MindTree
Capability is good but integration and scalability need improvement
Pros and Cons
- "The capability is at a seven or eight out of ten."
- "In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5."
What is our primary use case?
We use it to publicly deliver applications.
What is most valuable?
The capability is at a seven or eight out of ten.
What needs improvement?
In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5.
We need a very large team to manage the solution. Had it been cloud native, it would have been very seamless, but because it's not cloud native, it does not integrate really well.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for a few years.
It's a cloud solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
From a scalability point of view, this solution is not really up to the mark. The on-demand requirements or on-demand scalability options are not good.
We have close to 5,000 applications hosted on F5 that are delivered.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is very poor. They do not deliver on their SLAs, and even when we escalate the issue, we do not get a good response in 24 hours.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. For a very basic, standard F5 setup, the best practices based deployment will work fine. However, for very large scale deployment models, the recommendations that come in from F5 may not really meet your requirements.
For a typical setup, you would like to mimic how it's been set up on-premises, but this is not the way you would set it up on the cloud. You will end up hitting limitations on the cloud, and you would have to rearchitect your overall design or configurations when you deploy it. As a result, the setup for the hybrid model is not straightforward.
What other advice do I have?
We strongly recommend not to go with F5 when internal teams or verticals want to mimic the same architecture.
In terms of the capability, I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at seven or eight, on a scale from one to ten, and in terms of scalability at four or five. Overall, I would rate it at six.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Load balancing brings high availability and a bigger ability to scale out
Pros and Cons
- "Load balancing generally brings high availability and a bigger ability to scale out. In some cases, it brings security, depending on how it is configured."
- "I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome."
What is our primary use case?
When we migrate workloads into the cloud, we need the same functionality in the cloud, and low balancing is part of that. Being able to manage the platform on cloud, the same as on-premise, is the use case.
How has it helped my organization?
Load balancing generally brings high availability and a bigger ability to scale out. In some cases, it brings security, depending on how it is configured.
What is most valuable?
- Flexibility
- Capacity
- Reputation in the market.
What needs improvement?
I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome.
For how long have I used the solution?
More than five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. It's a pretty solid product.
Our clients use it pretty heavily. Most all of them are production workloads and some of them are external facing workloads, so you can see seasonal peaks.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's very scalable. Probably the largest implementation I did was with hundreds of servers behind it.
How is customer service and technical support?
The technical support is very good.
What about the implementation team?
We haven't had any issues with the integration and configuration of AWS. It works just like it would on-premise. I have some questions around its scale in the cloud. We haven't done as much work in the cloud as we've done with on-premise. However, so far we haven't had any problems with it either.
What was our ROI?
My clients have seen ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There is always the Cisco on-premise solution in play. There are also the AWS native functionalities.
The ease of management is the tie-breaker for F5, being able to manage the on-premise and cloud with the same tools.
It's fairly easy to integrate. If you compare it to Cisco products, Cisco is very regimented and works best with themselves. F5 has been forced to play nice with others, which is a bonus.
What other advice do I have?
The three key things to look at closely:
- Look at the flexibility of the products.
- The ability to work with it on-premise and in the cloud is a huge advantage.
- The ability to integrate it with other non-F5 products.
We use both the AWS and on-premise versions. They work about the same, which is what I like about the product: same management plane and configuration.
It integrates with the networking layer, which is fairly complicated. Depending on the customer, there are different products that it integrates with. More often than not, it's load balancing in front of Windows in Unix. In some cases, integrating with other tools like the LP or other network products.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
Lead Infrastructure Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Reliable with good support and useful load-balancing features
Pros and Cons
- "The setup is pretty easy."
- "The GUI needs improvement."
What is our primary use case?
We usually use the product for load balancing, as a web server, and for web traffic.
How has it helped my organization?
We're hosting a website for our company, and the solution has helped a lot with load balancing.
What is most valuable?
The load-balancing features are great. You can do several different types, depending on the application.
The solution offers good automation.
It's stable and reliable.
The solution can scale.
The setup is pretty easy.
They offer good technical support.
What needs improvement?
The GUI needs improvement. They need some sort of help section in the GUI, like descriptions of certain features. There are a lot of features, and it is hard to remember what does what. Having some sort of prompt or pop-up in the GUI would help a lot.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for around six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and reliability are great. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. It's easy to expand.
We have two or three users directly dealing with the solution.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support has been helpful and responsive so far.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
While I was involved in the on-premises deployment. For the cloud, I didn't have to do much. It's a pretty straightforward setup. The only complex part is building the HA since it's linked to following a certain procedure. In that case, the ease of implementation depends on the experience of the one who's going to deploy it.
Two people should be able to handle deployment.
What was our ROI?
We have witnessed a return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'd rate the pricing three out of ten. It is quite expensive to scale up.
What other advice do I have?
The product can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.
If a customer really wants a robust and stable load-balancing appliance, they should go for LTM.
I'd rate it eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Security Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited
Good load balancing and web proxy features with good attack prevention
Pros and Cons
- "It has helped a lot to protect our organization from external attacks, especially XSS or XSRF types of attacks."
- "It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it."
What is our primary use case?
We use this product to hide true identity of our web servers from external users while balancing the loads of those external users.
For load balancing, we have various load balancing method. We can define these methods at the node or pool level.
We are retail users and have lot of websites for online businesses to prevent attacks. On those sites, there is a WAF module that we also use, which prevents attacks on it.
It acts as a reverse proxy for our web servers, and we can use certificate to protect from attackers and send encrypted traffic to F5 which then decrypt and passes to the internal server after encrypting again using a server-side certificate or sending in plain form.
How has it helped my organization?
It has helped a lot to protect our organization from external attacks, especially XSS or XSRF types of attacks.
It serves as a reverse proxy for our web servers which takes the request from the internet users on F5 public-facing IP using an encrypted connection and then it decrypts the packet using a client-side certificate. We use server-side certificates to encrypt the traffic and send it to the server. Internet users never know what the real server IP is. It does NATing to hide the identity and it has an ASM module to protect it from web attacks.
What is most valuable?
There are a lot of good things this solution has, including:
The LTM module helps to load balance the traffic among the internal web server in our case using round robin and least connection method.
The ASM module prevents web attacks and protects our web servers.
The irule feature is used to write these irules to redirect the traffic or sometimes prevent automated attacks such as through BOTs where the distinction between real and fake users becomes increasingly tricky.
Its virtual servers have the option to configure other things to increase the speed of serving requests like the use of a persistence profile.
What needs improvement?
The major drawback is it has lot of options nested inside, and each option has a lot of options. I'm not sure who might be using all those options or even some (limited) good options. They should pare everything down.
It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it. Creating virtual servers, managing pools, and nodes until it is working on WAF side of it becomes difficult while writing the irules.
Another drawback is we are using a physical appliance. It becomes very slow and unresponsive. Even logs cannot load on the box to troubleshoot. It overwrites the logs. They need to do something in log storage locally on this box in the next release.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Presales at Efficient IT Systems Ltd
Valuable combination of ADC and WAN available
Pros and Cons
- "The combination of ADC and WAN is the most valuable feature."
- "There is room for improvement in the user interface."
What is our primary use case?
The use case for F5 includes ADC, WAF (Web Application Firewall), network firewall, and CGNAT in one platform.
What is most valuable?
The combination of ADC and WAN is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
F5 is a bit expensive in comparison. Moreover, there is room for improvement in the user interface. It can be more user-friendly.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is good. I would rate it a ten out of ten. There are over 50 users in our organization using the solution. Mostly the manager and the person in charge use this solution, but we usually work with the security and network teams as well.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and support team is quite good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is quite complex. It took us around one to two months to deploy the solution.
What about the implementation team?
For the deployment process, we have to perform an assessment because it's quite complex. There are a lot of parameters that need to be counted before redeployment. So, an assessment is recommended before the deployment process.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We use the yearly-based license. I have personally not seen any additional costs.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend it. I would advise them to check their requirements thoroughly in order to load balancing and also to protect their data.
Overall, I would rate the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
Buyer's Guide
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Updated: November 2024
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