F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

F5 delivers a full range of solutions that simplify service providers’ security architectures while mitigating threats. The full proxy architecture of F5 solutions also allows service providers to attain extensive visibility and control throughout layers 4 through 7. This enables granular control of all connections, more extensive security functionality, and comprehensive end-to-end protection against DDoS and other attacks. F5 solutions protect targeted network elements, the DNS infrastructure, devices, and applications with features that include application health monitoring, a robust web application firewall, web access controls, TCP optimization, web acceleration, L7 DDoS protection, and broad SSL support, including SSL inspection and offload.

I installed F5 on the DMZ zone of the firewall. The traffic will come to the virtual server of the F5. F5 will decrypt the traffic and offload the traffic to the firewall as clear.
This way, we can mitigate many attacks from the F5 and from the firewall.

Protection of published website. When using ASM, we can have a layer 7 protection in order to prevent the website from attacks.

F5 should improve or develop the reporting tools further.
They should improve the management policies on the BOX.

It's a stable product.

They have one box and you can implement many features with it like LTM, ASM, GTM. So it is scalable. And they have a virtual edition and an appliance edition.

Technical support is a seven out of 10. They provide quick solutions and they reply to us very fast.

Straightforward.

It's fair, it's not too expensive. Maybe just a little high.

It's a good product to use. It has many features so can use it to secure your environment. I'm satisfied with the product.

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.

I use F5 BIG-IP LTM to balance the load across multiple servers hosting a website or web application, ensuring none get overwhelmed. It is handy for ensuring that services like my email server or database stay available and responsive, even if one server goes down. Plus, it is not just for web traffic; it can manage traffic for any TCP or UDP-based service, like FTP or SIP.

The value and impact of using F5 BIG-IP LTM for application delivery control in our organization are significant. It ensures the availability, stability, and reliability of our applications, ultimately contributing to smooth operations and enhanced user experience.

One area for improvement with F5 BIG-IP LTM could be its pricing, which some may find on the higher side. Lowering costs could make the solution more accessible to a wider range of organizations.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for about six years.

It is a stable solution.

F5 BIG-IP LTM is a scalable solution, especially when deployed as a virtual machine. You can increase resources and licenses as needed, providing flexibility for growth. However, with physical appliances, scalability may be limited by hardware and license constraints.

The technical support is excellent.

Setting up F5 BIG-IP LTM is generally straightforward. In a Windows environment, initial setup might take around thirty minutes, with additional time depending on specific needs and applications. The deployment process involves configuring nodes and tools for each server and application and setting up load balancing. Additional features like compression and caching profiles can be configured as needed. Once configured, it is typically self-loading, making ongoing management easier.

The initial investment in F5 BIG-IP LTM has been worthwhile for our organization.

The licensing cost for F5 BIG-IP LTM is typically on a yearly basis, with options for one-year or three-year terms. It is quite expensive.

In our organization, we use F5 BIG-IP LTM for local balancing and traffic management. It helps us evenly distribute incoming traffic across our servers, ensuring our applications like Tobe and DNS run smoothly. Plus, it handles traffic for other services, like STV, effectively managing our network flow.

F5 BIG-IP LTM has been crucial in enhancing application delivery and optimizing network traffic. Its robust features ensure that applications are delivered efficiently and reliably. From load balancing to SSL offloading, it handles tasks seamlessly, making applications run smoothly.

The features of F5 BIG-IP LTM that are most crucial for ensuring high availability, performance, and application optimization are its load balancing capabilities, SSL offloading, and traffic acceleration through compression.

The security capabilities of F5 BIG-IP LTM, such as SSL offloading and firewall services, are extremely valuable to us. 

As a system administrator, I find the F5 BIG-IP LTM interface very user-friendly and intuitive. It simplifies complex tasks, making management easier. Compared to other vendors, it stands out for its ease of use. Plus, its analytics features streamline monitoring and decision-making.

My advice to new users is that if you are considering using F5 BIG-IP LTM for application delivery control and firewall capabilities, I would advise starting with a clear understanding of your organization's needs and objectives. Evaluate how F5 BIG-IP LTM aligns with your requirements, considering factors like scalability, performance, and security features. Additionally, explore alternative solutions like F5 ASM or FortiWeb to ensure you choose the best fit for your specific use case.

Overall, I would rate F5 BIG-IP LTM as a nine out of ten.

We are using F5 BIG-IP LTM for our application which is a reverse proxy. We use it for availability, and to process the application because it is used in the financial industry.

The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP LTM is it helps our delivery team to make policies and rules for application.

The user interface of F5 BIG-IP LTM is old and could improve.

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

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

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.

This solution is best suited for medium to large-sized businesses in the finance and telecommunications industries.

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

The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is not good.

I rate the support from F5 BIG-IP LTM a five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM is simple because our project is not complicated. The implementation took approximately three days.

I rate the initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM a seven out of ten.

The price of F5 BIG-IP LTM could improve.

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

This is a good solution, but it is expensive. I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM an eight out of ten.

For everything, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is used. We used it for our exchange server before migrating to Teams, and then for Skype. It currently operates several large broadcasting and streaming services.

Our jump server is quite large. To keep the high number of connections, we had to deploy it behind the F5. That saved us a lot of time and achieved our goal of having a stable jump server. When you put it behind an F5, you divide the connections between a couple of nodes, which was something we didn't have before.

We are using almost all of the features. What we like best about this solution is its stability. It is extremely stable.

So far, everything appears to be fine. I wouldn't be the best person to comment on something like APIs because I haven't really dug into a lot of APIs. However, I believe F5 falls a little short when it comes to APIs. But I'm not certain.

I have been running F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for nine years.

We haven't done an upgrade in three years.

It is being used internally. We have a large number of internal services.  We kept a few services, say two or three services that are being published, but it's primarily intended for our internal services.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very stable.

We are a broadcast company. We have streaming services running behind this box. This streaming service has been released, with 19 to 20 streams. We haven't received any complaints about these streams since the streaming service was deployed behind F5. Despite the fact that these streams consume a lot of bandwidth and have millions of sessions. We haven't received many complaints about them.

It reaches a point where scaling is no longer possible. Assume you have two boxes, and you want to expand. You can divide it into what is known as vices or virtual systems, but then you're stuck. This is where, NGINX comes in, in a better way, where you can simply scale up by adding more VMs or appliances without running into problems because you have an NGINX controller that controls everything.

The users are mostly administrators and network engineers like myself. The number of end users is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000.

They were extremely helpful in both SLA and non-SLA cases. An SLA case is one in which assistance is required, and the assistance must provide you with a solution.

Technical support was also helpful in non-SLA cases where I requested assistance, as well as in sharing guides and documents.

I would rate the technical support a four and a half out of five.

Positive

We are using a combination of F5 and NGINX.

I am still relatively new to NGINX. We recently implemented it in our environment.

We are interested in NGINX. We would like to explore the NGINX platform. It has multiple platforms such as security, APIs, and application gateways.

We are looking into it, as well as the LTM module of it.

We are also interested in learning more about Kemp LoadMaster.

Nothing goes as smoothly as you might expect, but it wasn't all that difficult. We had a few issues at first, but it's been running very smoothly since then.

I wasn't present when F5 was installed. It has been nine years. However, I have completed a few deployments in one of the branch offices, and to be honest, it wasn't all that complicated.

Because it was a new deployment, it didn't require any strategy, migration plan, or anything else.

We do not use third-party vendors. Everything is completed in-house.

This solution is managed by two network engineers, myself, and a colleague.

I would rate the ROI a three out of five.

I would rate the pricing a three out of five.

There are no additional fees to the standard licensing fee; everything is paid once.

I was comparing products like Apache Web Server, F5 LTM, Fortinet FortiADC, Kemp LoadMaster, and NGINX Plus.

It depends on the use case. However, if you are not interested in the application side, F5 would be useful. If you just want a load balancer that balances multiple servers, that's all you need. Not basic, but basic to intermediate material. F5 takes first place with no one even close to matching it. However, if you want to go deeper and more advanced, you should look into NGINX or any other vendor that has more options or more features.

As a network engineer, I am totally happy with the product.

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

As an IT developer, mostly I use load balancing for the traffic. Currently, it's distributing the load perfectly, as per my understanding of our requirements.

It's definitely scalable and is stable as well.

The initial setup is not complex, and the technical support is fine.

I'm not very sure about the security with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). We have our own private data center, but we are going to migrate our private data center into the Azure cloud environment. Security will then be a major concern when we migrate our own whole infrastructure to the public cloud.

So, I think they should improve in terms of security because nowadays, most organizations try to build their infrastructure on public cloud.

More documentation should be uploaded because very limited documentation is available on the internet. It will also help us to understand the system before purchasing the product.

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's a stable solution.

It's definitely scalable. It's a distributed architecture and micro services, so it's scalable. In fact, we are planning to increase usage and scale horizontally.

I don't have any issues with respect to technical support; it has been fine.

The initial setup is not complex. 

If you have your own data center, then you can use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). I don't see any issues because they have been in the industry for a long time, and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very stable.

I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to 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 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.