F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

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.

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.

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.

• Flexibility
• Capacity
• Reputation in the market.

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.

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.

It's very scalable. Probably the largest implementation I did was with hundreds of servers behind it.

The technical support is very good.

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.

My clients have seen ROI.

It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay.

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.

The three key things to look at closely:

1. Look at the flexibility of the products.
2. The ability to work with it on-premise and in the cloud is a huge advantage.
3. 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.

The primary use cases are application load balancing and as a web application firewall.

We resell F5 as partners. Our customers have a clear business case to reduce downtime, improving resource utilization.

The major applications that front-end core banking for most banks and Microsoft Exchange were experiencing performance challenges without F5. After front-ending these applications through an application delivery controller with F5, most of the performance issues went away.

It is very intuitive, easy to deploy, and manage.

The solution's capabilities has been most instrumental in supporting our customers. I find it reliable. Once it is configured, and up and running, then there usually is no downtime.

In terms of performance, we have seen a drastic difference without F5, then with it. If you run the same application from users to the server when there wasn't F5, there were delays. With F5, users can see a remarkable performance difference from a qualitative sense.

Implementing whitepapers with a lot more applications could easily be added.

This project is missing some relevant features: 

1. We set up the customer through the load balancer.
2. Then once it is there and functional, then the next step is to add the web application firewall on the same boxes. 

Not with the GA versions. Obviously, the betas are not that stable.

When you enable the web application firewall on the same platform, it requires more resources. If the use case is only for load balancing, but the customers using both load balancing as well as web application firewall, the sizing has to be done correctly.

The technical support is good and up to mark. 

There is a challenge in Pakistan. This is when there is a hardware failure. Sometimes, it takes more time to get a replacement because it is sent out from the U.S. or some other regional outpost. Thus, it takes two to three days to receive a replacement.

A few of our customers were using Brocade, Citrix NetScaler, or A10. We moved them to F5, because there were more customer references available for F5 in our country and the support structure was better.

The initial setup was very straightforward in GUI. It was not complex.

It is the best solution, but that comes with an increased price.

Try to negotiate all the software features that you require upfront. E.g., if you need three different software features and a web application firewall, then try to log the prices initially when you are buying the initial solution, even if you are not buying some of the software but at least log the prices for features.

Our customers normally evaluate others too and shortlist F5 based on ease of use.

It is best of the breed, or best in class. Our experience has been very good, in terms of performance, and securing our application infrastructure.

I strongly recommend the product, but through an experienced partner.

With these type of application delivery controller projects, the application teams have a significant role. It is networking team plus the application team. With better coordination between all the different teams who are engaged, project execution will go more smoothly.

The use case for F5 includes ADC, WAF (Web Application Firewall), network firewall, and CGNAT in one platform.

The combination of ADC and WAN is the most valuable feature. 

F5 is a bit expensive in comparison. Moreover, there is room for improvement in the user interface. It can be more user-friendly. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

It is a stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

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.

The customer service and support team is quite good. 

The initial setup is quite complex. It took us around one to two months to deploy the solution. 

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.

We use the yearly-based license. I have personally not seen any additional costs. 

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. 

We usually use the product for load balancing, as a web server, and for web traffic.

We're hosting a website for our company, and the solution has helped a lot with load balancing. 

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.

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. 

I've been using the solution for around six years. 

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. 

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. 

Technical support has been helpful and responsive so far. 

Positive

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. 

We have witnessed a return on investment. 

I'd rate the pricing three out of ten. It is quite expensive to scale up. 

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. 

BIG-IP LTM is mainly used to load balance applications.

BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration. It's also very flexible because you can use iRules to manipulate the traffic.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for over ten years.

BIG-IP LTM is quite stable - sometimes there are security vulnerabilities, but they inform us when a patch is needed. 

BIG-IP LTM is scalable - once F5 is installed, you can keep adding servers behind it.

BIG-IP LTM's technical support is good - once you log a case with them, the support is quite prompt and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex - it's quite flexible in terms of configuration, but the person configuring it needs to understand the application side, the network side, and the server. The speed of deployment depends on the application requirement and the application deployment cycle.

BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product, so it's quite expensive and isn't affordable for all customers. F5's licensing is based on modules, so there are separate charges depending on which features you want.

Before implementing BIG-IP LTM, you should understand your expectations and requirements, especially from the application team. Putting BIG-IP LTM into a not-so-critical environment would be very expensive, so you may want to consider more medium-range solutions that can do the same job. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of ten 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 are using it for load balancing and security.

When someone requests data through the load balancer, we pull the certificate name out to identify who that person is. This is one of the things that F5 does. We haven't able to replicate this so far with the Amazon products. That is why we are going to F5.

It has the ability to do the security work that we need along with the current thing which is supporting the load balancer. Therefore, it can determine if the system is going down, then route the traffic somewhere else.

It does what we need.

We had a problem where customers were doing transactions in our system, pulling health records, and the system had to be shut down for maintenance. Unfortunately, we wouldn't know that the system was being shut down, and we would lose that information. Then, the customer would get upset.

Using the F5, we were able to build rules to detect that the shutdown was occurring, then begin to route people elsewhere, so we didn't have any outages or downtime. This made customers a lot happier, and it made us a lot happier.

They could improve the product's ease of use. There has been a bit of complication on some things from the admin side. There is some confusion how to operate it.

I don't think too much stress placed on it. In F5 Studio, the stability been very good.

We run 14 servers. We get up to about half a million transactions an hour, and the scalability has been good. It has not been a problem.

I would rate the technical support as a five out of ten. Our admin had to learn everything and do it himself. He seems to have had difficultly at times with the tech support. However, this may be a manifestation of the fact the government bought it, but didn't buy the support.

The integration and configuration of this product were pretty good. Once you get going, it gets easier to use.

It works with Red Hat JBoss application server, and it integrates reasonably well.

It is sort of a commodity product. A load balancer is a load balancer. What will be, at the end of the day, the cheapest option or have the best performance, that is what it will come down to. Can it do the necessary performance that we need, and if so, is there a cheaper alternative? If not, then we'll stick with what we have.

We also evaluated some free stuff on the AWS Marketplace, or some cheaper stuff. We also looked at the Amazon offerings, like the Elastic Load Balancing.

The customer wanted to take what they had on-premise and put it in Amazon: full stop. Because we could obtain the certifications for security and the existing Amazon products didn't do 100 percent of what F5 did, they didn't want us to change any code. They just wanted us to keep going the way we were. This is the reason why we pulled F5 over.

Try doing a proof of concept or a prototype, before you go full in on a load balancer, to make sure it does everything you need.

We have both the AWS and on-premise versions. We used the on-premise version to compare it to what Amazon had to offer.