F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

F5 BIG-IP LTM is used for delivering applications and protecting the application from web attacks.

F5 BIG-IP LTM can improve on the SSL loading which includes the authentication of certificates. Although, most of these issues have been solved there are still some issue that persists.

In a feature release, it would be helpful to have real-time packet features in the GUI.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately two years.

I have clients that have approximately 5,000 users using the solutions and others with 40,000 users.

When we increase the services we have to then increase the usage of the solution, we put more virtual F5 devices in the cloud.

The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM is straightforward. The full deployment took approximately two to three days.

I used one person for the deployment of F5 BIG-IP LTM because it is easy to do.

There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket with the support.

The second option is a subscription model on the cloud. When I have a project that will only one year. I purchase a subscription for one year only. It would work for the whole year and after we can shut it down because there is no need for it.

My advice to others is to have a good staff who understand the technology. If someone understands the technology, that will make life easy for them or their organization. I cannot say that technology is difficult, but technology is very critical when you put it in your environment. Having good staff who can manage that solution makes life a lot easier.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM a nine out of ten.

I am using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for load balancing. For example, I create the virtual server, and in there we have a pool and member server. This is used for simple load balancing.

We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing.

When I was using the solution I was using the basic functions and I found it difficult to handle some of the more advanced features. I needed assistance from my IT department or the vendors themself. There should be more workshops are places to gain knowledge on how to use the solution. You need specific skill sets to use it.

I have used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager(LTM) within the past 12 months.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a stable and reliable solution.

Our whole IT department is using the solution with some application teams. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in the IT department.

When there is an issue it is first looked at by our internal team rather a ticket being opened directly with the vendor. I open the tickets to our internal team and if they cannot solve the issue, they will escalate to the vendor. The technical support from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is good.

We did not do the implementation ourselves.

It is important to know how the solution works. For example, how to set up the interface, routing, pools, and the implementation steps. After the basic configurations, you will understand you may need or want to try to learn more of the features, such as the layers of the SNI. It is ideal to start with the very basic implementation first. We have been doing the day-to-day operation.

When it comes to troubleshooting, it is important to know how to isolate the problem, analyze it, and be fast to solve them when it appears.

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

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for our applications. We have six applications and 16 servers currently. We make all our applications and utilize this tool. Some applications are published on LSM.

The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved.

I've used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for one year, within the last year.

We find this tool stable. We are sensitive to changes, and for us, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is scalable.

We had a good setup experience with this tool, but we had to raise a ticket with support for assistance.

We implemented F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager ourselves. We didn't use a consultant or integrator for implementation, but we contacted their support team.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a high-priced tool. We pay for its license yearly.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager has good performance.

Your success with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager will depend on how much you understand how the application is working.

Deployment of this tool took two hours.

We have 600 users of this tool, and currently, there's no requirement for increasing its usage.

We have one manager and two technical staff who takes care of the deployment and maintenance of this tool. They're building applications, and they're using this tool.

I'm recommending F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to others who want to start using it.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I'm rating F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an eight.

We are using this solution for the web application firewall and load balancing.

F5 has many capabilities for load balancing and web application firewall features.

There should be more logging improvements on F5. The logging features are too limited and do not give us a solid understanding of what's happening. For example, the web application firewall logs don't say complete, or why this is blocked, which signature or which root cause is blocking the log. 

Also, it can provide more understandable windows or dashboards regarding the latency of the application.

Citrix has cheap tools that show what is happening and describe why did they happen.

I would like to see improvements to the dashboard, latency reporting, and monitoring. Improvements in these areas would be very valuable.

I have been using F5 for approximately four years.

F5 is very stable. We have gone 300 days with no failures.

In regards to scalability, I have never experienced any bottlenecks of the hardware or the features of F5. F5 doesn't have any latencies.

With Citrix, at times we experience some latencies when the web application requires more complex directions, inspections, and more complex load balancing features.

The number of users is variant. Currently, we have more than 10,000 users.

I have not experienced any issues with technical support.

Citrix doesn't have as many options.

If you were to compare Citrix with F5, the pros of F5 is the idle features. It's very powerful and you can do tons of work with a few lines.

With Citrix, you have to learn and understand the regular expressions, but the regular expressions consume a lot of the hardware. Also, it is much more complicated.

F5 pricing is too high, compared to Citrix. 

If a big sector or a company needs more security and more control over applications and the ADC, F5 is the best choice. But if a company needs only an ADC, without the web application firewall features, Citrix is fine.

For those who are interested in this solution and you want more control over the applications then F5 is fine.

In the future, F5 will be our first choice, but everything can change.

What happens with the next features, we don't know. Maybe Citrix will overcome the problems and will become a more powerful tool than F5.

Without consideration of the price, I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.   

This is for remote access to an internal network of the organization to do all types of work. The requirement for VPN is secure with high performance.

Two issues found in using BIG-IP VPN compared with Cisco VPN:

1. Performance: Two applications are being used: remote desktop (RDP or rdesktop) and VNC viewer. Comparisons are done on the same client machines (Windows 10 and Linux 16.04) over the same network. When using Cisco VPN, applications are working smoothly while occasionally jittery. When using F5 VPN, applications are quite jittery. Sometimes applications are useless (too slow to refresh the screen).
2. Client support: Cisco VPN has more Clients supported than BIG-IP, e.g., BSD.

Still not clear why our IT decided to switch to F5 BIG-IP after two years experience. It appears as if there may be some advantage (possibly) related to security concerns (more secure?).

Performance is the first thing and most critical issue that needs improvement.

Supporting more Clients would be nice, but without improving performance, F5 will not widely be used for critical work. It killed an international meeting the first time that we used BIG-IP VPN.

Performance: Using the product, applications are jittery.

No issues.

We used Cisco VPN. I am not sure why our IT forced us to switch to F5 without our feedback.

Initial setup is easy and pretty standard. Setup is not much different from all other VPNs.

In-house.

Unless the price difference is large, this is not the primary concern for the product. The performance and product-related issues (secure for VPN, multi-function for network device, etc.) are the keys.

No.

We are using the solution for our internal and client purposes. We are a cloud service provider.

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.

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.

I have been using the solution for many years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. It meets the requirements.

We have contacted the technical support team. The team is customer-friendly and knowledgeable.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes just one minute because we use scripts. We need one technical person for the deployment.

The solution is robust and reliable. It provides us with security.

The product is expensive. We pay a yearly licensing fee.

We recommend the product to others. It is scalable and reliable. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use it to publicly deliver applications.

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.

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.

We've been using it for a few years.

It's a cloud 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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a reseller. We provide solutions to our clients.

We use F5 for various applications as our firewall.

The most valuable feature of this solution is IP Intelligence.

It is very powerful and has good performance. It meets our requirements.

The features included are more than enough.

The deployment could be simplified. From a technical perspective, it is complex.

The pricing could be reduced. 

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) since 2020.

We are using 1G-V Virtual Edition.

It's a stable solution. We don't have any issues with the stability of the F5 product.

We have approximately 115 people in our organization who use this solution.

I have no issues with the technical support. They are good and provide professional service.

F5 is very fast to respond. Our team contacted technical support via email about issues, and after one hour they call us to resolve them.

Overall, F5 support is very good.

I was using Akamai from 2017 until 2020 when we started using F5.

When comparing F5 with Akamai, F5 is more powerful and has more intelligence. It also has the ability to update its software very rapidly.

Akamai is slow to respond, they can take up to four or five hours to respond to a complaint.

We use Microsoft in my office for our operational daily activity.

The deployment is complex. Technically, it is very complex.

It took us four, or maybe five weeks to deploy.

We did not use an integrator or consultant. We have a team in our organization.

F5 is expensive. Reasonable in comparison, but it should be cheaper.

This solution is focused on segment customers. I would recommend it to Telco companies, as well as for banking and customers who need to protect their applications, and websites. 

The F5 support is very responsive.

I would rate  F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an eight out of ten.