F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

I use BIG-IP LTM for load balancing and WAF.

The multi-data center is perfect.

BIG-IP LTM's sandboxing integration could be improved.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for two to three years.

BIG-IP LTM is completely stable, and its performance is good.

I believe BIG-IP LTM is scalable, but you have to pay for extra expansions.

The initial setup was straightforward, and I would rate the ease of the setup process as 4.5 out of five. The ACC deployment took one day, but the WAF tuning took around two weeks because it was a new application and needed tuning.

We used an in-house team.

I would rate our ROI as 4.5 out of five.

BIG-IP LTM isn't a cheap solution - I'd rate its pricing as three out of five.

I evaluated Citrix 40 Web.

You need an expert to set up the policies, as it's not a straightforward process. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of nine out of ten.

I think the product is a good product. I think where they can improve is in the licensing. It's quite expensive. They could make it more aligned with the business model than with the hardware.

I have been using F5 for about two years.

It is a stable product but sometimes we have some issues. I have other products that are competitors of F5, and they are also good. The performance of F5 so far is good.

Usually, because we are responsible for providing high availability, we run our architecture with redundancy. Usually, for example, when I have F5, I have a couple of F5s, the active one and the standby one. Today, I had problems. I don't know what happened; it couldn't reload automatically. The other one assumed that I have problems with my infrastructure. That's unfortunately the life of an operations guy.

It is scalable and should meet our future requirements.

Technical support is OK. Usually, you don't have direct support from the vendor. You have intermediating in the middle.

The setup is not straightforward. To set up this product, you must know how to do it. Otherwise, you can't do it. It's not plug and play.

They could buy it but there are other choices such as Cisco ACE products, as well. We have it. They are also good. F5 are good. Usually, I'm not locked into one vendor.

The reality is our bookkeeping department unfortunately has a problem with them. Because of that, I have had some issues concerning getting services from the vendor.

We use the solution for its load balancing and web application firewall features.

The solution's valuable features are flexibility, stability, security, and performance.

The solution's hardware quality needs improvement. Also, its cloud-based anti-DDoS has limitations. It could be better.

We have been using the solution for four years.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good in some areas. Although, it could be faster.

Positive

In comparison with Barracuda, the solution has better performance.

The solution is easy to install. It takes a day to configure and requires three engineers to execute the process. Also, it requires one executive to maintain it.

The solution is good in terms of investment.

The solution is more expensive than Barracuda. We pay yearly for its support services. There are no additional costs involved apart from the standard license.

One must check the performance capacity of internal applications while using the solution, as wrong configurations lead to failure in accessing them.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a stable product from a stable company. Recently, they have been more focused on security as well.

Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution.
F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust.

I've worked with this solution for about two years.

It's a stable product.

It is scalable.

In my experience, I have received excellent support from F5 for any technical issues that I or my customers have faced. I have had no issues with technical support.

The initial setup is easy.

The price is little bit on higher side, compared to the cost of NGINX.

If you are a partner, then I would recommend that you go through the partner portal videos because they have very good training videos that help you to learn the product and technology when it comes to implementation. It helps a lot with implementation, and they have detailed documentation that explains the implementation process step by step. Once you go through that, you'll definitely have a clear understanding of the implementation process. Without that, it may be a little bit tricky for you to complete the implementation in a smooth manner.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use it for load balancing any kind of HTTP and HTTPS traffic coming from users or other systems.

One of the greatest things about F5 Load Balancer is that it provides additional capability for handling huge workloads and routing them to an SAP or non-SAP application. It is capable of supporting a large amount of user workload and application connectivity workload. This was the main reason why we chose F5.

It is a hardware load balancer, and its installation procedure is more complex than a software load balancer. There are pros and cons of using hardware load balancing. You have to have specific hardware deployed in your data center to activate this load balancer. They never came up with any software-based load balancing solution. It is all hardware-based.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

Its stability is good.

It is scalable. We have around 2,000 plus users.

Their technical support is fine. 

It is a hardware load balancer, so its installation procedure is more complex than a software load balancer. You need specific hardware to install this load balancer.

We had evaluated a few SAP solutions, but we found F5 to be more suitable at that time.

I would recommend this solution. We have been using it for such a long time, and we are quite happy with it as an organization. It is awesome, and we plan to keep using it till we are on-prem. It has been good for our on-prem setup. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I am quite satisfied with this solution.

We use F5 BIG-IP with LTM burst, SM burst, and ETM burst. We use it in our cloud service and all our service centers. We even offer F5 BIG-IP to our partners.

As a firm, we use F5 BIG-IP to provide load balancing over many to increase one of the hardware appliances that carries loads over the throughput they are providing. 

Ultimately, the service has not affected our customers. However, there was a failure in one of the nodes that became infected.

F5 BIG-IP did not sense that the virus was there. The security didn't function.

F5 BIG-IP is used with good applications and functions as an application firewall with additional features.

I've been building F5 BIG-IP. We will not use any feature or any service unless there is a business case and there is a need for business implementation. 

The products are great and easy to upgrade from time to time to improve functionality. F5 BIG-IP is working fine. We use it more in production and operations.

There are issues with F5 BIG-IP but they are minor issues, not big ones. This does not affect production and services.

Sometimes the operations and the facility systems fail. However, there is an alert action from the windows. 

Related to the groups, when it comes to cost, rates are regulated. When the market is not good, then we will consider doing the increase. 

In general, there are more features that could be provided with F5 BIG-IP if it were not so costly.

From application to application to customer respects, you can't always customize software based on customer requirements. If you don't consider that, you can't deliver.

F5 BIG-IP is very stable.

F5 BIG-IP has good scalability. We have a team managing the product. The team consists of three specialists, but they do not manage that many customers, they manage customers.

We're beginning to align well with F5 BIG-IP. I've been in contact with customer service.

I have notifications from the alert window and all of the issues would be resolved.

The initial setup is not straightforward. You can consider F5 BIG-IP as a standard. It is not complex. In the end, the product itself is serving the business and services.

For deployment, we used one engineer only. The main point to consider is the client's position. We have to respect the client's business requirements.

5 BIG-IP is too expensive at the current licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options but chose 5 BIG-IP on basis of merit.

We use F5 BIG-IP a lot in production right now. The product is indispensable to us.

I would rate the product an overall nine out of ten. Most of the benefits of F5 BIG-IP are cyclical because of the licensing costs.

F5 has performed marvelously. It certainly holds in value and holds its name.

We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance.

I would like to see improvement in the manageability and easier setup. 

They need to have features that you can turn on and spin up and not have to buy a license for. I'd want to be able to quickly spin up a feature and start using it and then come back and pay for it later. Citrix has them beat on that. 

F5s are rock solid. I've seen them deploy in major data centers and they're rock solid.

Scalability is similar to Citrix NetScaler where you can pay as you grow. It doesn't have the feature which you can just turn on. You have to buy into it, then you have to wait for the license, and then you have to wait to have somebody to pay for it. You can't deploy quickly.

F5 technical support is good. They have a lot of good people there. Once you get into the area of expertise that you need help with, those people are very good at helping with the problem. Every time I call in, I go right to tech support and they're really good help. 

The initial setup can be complex but it's not because of the F5 itself. It's because of your own network. You can get in your own way. What makes it complex is the fact that you have to stand back and figure out the configuration. F5 is there to help you with that and give you some idea on where to place it and what to do. Some of that also falls underneath the realm of managed services or just services in general. They start you with a brand new spiffy product, but you're left with the migration process. 

They are expensive. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. Not a ten because of the usability and a manageability. I've had to send somebody to F5 University to get trained, whereas with the Citrix NetScaler I don't necessarily have to send them out to training. I was able to pick up NetScaler right away. Whereas, F5, if you have it, you should probably get trained on it because it's a little more esoteric. 

Everybody wants the best of a name brand. If F5 was like a Tesla, would you want to buy a Tesla or a Toyota? They're both big name brands, but when you hear Tesla, you know exactly what that is; it's the futuristic top-of-the-line electric car. If you can afford a Tesla, then buy the Tesla but if you can't afford a Tesla, and you want something that's going to get you from point A to point B at a halfway decent price, go with Citrix.

We use it for brokering services.

It has made it a single entry point for all users, verging across all the VPCs. It is more of an SSO solution versus multitier user loggin.

• Central point of entry for our user base.
• User authentication
• PPI
• Integration with our website.

We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them. On the back-end, we have a SafeNet component. They are going to bring additional features in, so allowing integration with encryption and PKI, and tying it back into Microsoft AD in the back with an LDAP lookup for users.

The stability seems fine. We provide fault tolerance with HA, so we have two of them up and running. We have built in integration. Therefore, we do not worry about workload issues

It seems very scalable now. We have 200 users, going to about 10,000 within the next year. There are multiple VPCs and multiple AWS accounts.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment seems to be pretty straightforward. There doesn't seem to be anything complex. We haven't needed anything additional, like Professional Services.

We did use technical support on the original engineering.

We have seen ROI because we are not hosting it. We moved this to the cloud for our ingest, so our workload is moving to the cloud and Amazon.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there.

We have found the pricing and licensing on AWS to be competitive.

We looked at F5, Citrix, and VMware. We chose F5 because it has a better market name, seemed to be vendor-agnostic for providing capabilities that others didn't, and its reputation.

Use F5. It has a good reputation. We experienced easy implementation and had an overall good experience.

We use it only on AWS.