F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

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.

Primary use case for the product is high availability and load sharing of applications to be serviced. Also, it provides application security by use of the Application Security Manager.

It has enabled us to keep a sustainable and supported load balancing platform. This is partly due to Cisco withdrawing a large number of their load balancing products and also related to Microsoft Network Load Balancing not scaling enough to suit our needs.

The most valuable feature is the F5 LTM (Local Traffic Manager). This is the part of the product most organisations will be using most. It provides the core functionality to be able to load balance services and the means and the intelligence to be able to load balance based on advanced logic, e.g., TCL scripting.

The F5 GTM/BIGIP DNS (Global Traffic Manager) is another valuable feature. This feature allows for DNS load balancing, which means that high availability and load sharing can be done across services locally, as well as across datacenters with advanced capabilities.

I would like F5 to incorporate the ability to create your own custom roles and customised permissions within the product set. I have seen many customers wanting to give a certain level of access for the purposes of out-of-hours servicing to out-of-hours staff or teams that fulfill an operations type role.

For example, I would like to see the ability to create roles within F5 where I can specify permissions instead of choosing from a set list that does not always fit my organisation’s needs. The current roles available out-of-the-box do not allow for enough granularity for an operator role to take pool resources offline and push or commit those changes to the configuration/HA cluster. Every role within the F5 that can make changes should be able to commit those changes if the administrator(s) permits.

Stability has never been an issue with F5 BIG-IP. The product is geared predominantly at providing stability and resiliency across your infrastructure.

No issues with scalability have been encountered. I would say that this has largely been due to having a good F5 consultant and consultancy throughout the buying process and implementation. This has ensured that the product being purchased can scale past our current needs and fulfill potential future needs.

I would give a 10 out of 10. Technical support through F5 is very thorough. On most occasions, the F5 DevCentral and support website generally gives you a lot of the expertise that you need without having to raise a support ticket. If you ever reach the stage of needing to raise a support ticket, you usually are handed quickly to someone who is able to deal with your query as efficiently as possible.

Previously, I have used Cisco load balancing, e.g., Cisco CSM, Cisco ACE, Microsoft Network Load Balancing, and Cisco GSS. Previously, Cisco load balancing or Microsoft NLB had always been the preferred options. However, since Cisco discontinued most of their load balancing products, it makes it very difficult to find products of the same grade and functionality. Since we began using F5 that gap in functionality has been filled. With F5, you get not just standard load balancing, but an array of other highly useful products to boot.

The licensing pricing seems relatively easy enough to get your head around. I would advise anyone to ensure that you have a conversation with an F5 consultant before purchasing, as you would with most products. An F5 consultant is the best placed to understand your needs and ensure that you purchase the correct licensing and products for your requirements.

We did evaluate other options. We had already used products such as NetScaler, Microsoft NLB, and a vast array of Cisco load balancing products. F5 was chosen due to the level of power that the product has. I have not seen many single solutions that fulfill all the criteria that an F5 BIG-IP appliance can.

It is not superior to its competitors due to how advanced the features are and the modules that can be used. The product can be used with iRules, which are an advanced ways of making functions available on a load balancer via use of scripting in TCL.

I would strongly advise seeking technical consultation throughout purchasing and during implementation. This is usually because you can get good advice around best practises as well as utilising as much of the F5 features as possible. In some cases, you might even find yourself finding a solution to scenarios that you might not have been aware had a solution.

I rated this product four and a half stars, because of the level of advanced features available in the product versus cost. Though functionality is high, its cost can be considered slightly higher than its competitors.

Our use case for this product is a web function firewall and network firewall that we can use on one platform. 

I like the combination of ADC and WAN.

The UI could be improved and we also find the pricing to be quite high. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We have over 50 customers using this solution and it's very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The customer support is very good. 

The initial setup is quite complex and requires a pre-deployment assessment because of the range of parameters involved. I think the assessment process could be simplified. 

Licensing is paid on an annual basis and there are no additional costs. 

I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10. 

All of our web servers are load-balanced by F5.

The iRule feature is very useful for inspecting HTTP. Sometimes, we use it for modifying the headers of the HTTP.

F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud.

Recently, we were investigating offloading SSL as version TLS 1.3. I am not sure if we were able to do that or not.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

It is very stable.

They have a host where you can increase the CPUs dedicated for load balancing. You can mount a cluster to escalate, but in order to escalate, you need to virtualize the solution. Otherwise, you need to change the device and load something bigger.

I contacted them in the past. They provide good support.

I have used a Cisco solution in the past, but they discontinued the solution or the hardware. F5 is much better.

It is very easy. It depends a bit on what you want, but in one day or two days, you can have F5 load balancing on backend servers. It is very easy.

I would recommend others to choose a virtualized solution. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

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.   

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. 

My team uses F5 for two main purposes. The first purpose is load balancing. F5 is very good at load balancing. It allows you to set up monitors so it can easily detect if the systems' load balancing is actually up. In addition, we use F5 for intrusion detection on some externally facing pieces of the applications that I support.

We like the capability to combine the content switching with the intrusion prevention and adding the security roles, so we can expose certain sub-pieces outside without exposing everything.

Another feature that we like is how they integrate nicely with the Oracle PeopleSoft application, and since that's one of my main focuses, I really like that they have the built-in integration.

I have been really happy with what they have been doing.

They could improve the synchronization between their main site and the failover site. Sometimes, we run into issues where it does not sync well, so I would like to see that improved.

The synchronization does works fairly well. However, if I were to make changes,  I would make it easier to start the sync process. For example, once you get the changes pending you have to click inside to tell it to sync. It would be nice if it would offer a button to click on for the sync if it is only going one direction. Another feature which would be nice in a sync is to have the ability to compare if there are changes on both sides, and if there are conflicts, it would allow you to choose which to apply. Otherwise, it would sync both directions at the same time.

We haven't had any major downtime. The solution comes with a high availability situation, and I've never seen a situation where it was down, because even when you do the patch, you patch one side and then the other, and so always one side at least is up. I haven't noticed it to be down.

It is a scalable solution. I think it will meet our future requirements. We started using it when Cisco announced that they were no longer doing their content switch and we've been implementing it a lot. It's one of the current focuses that our company is doing in the infrastructure side of things.

Customer Service:

I usually go via the online support, which is very good.

Technical Support:

They have been very quick to respond to all of the needs that we've had. If you want ad-hoc support. They also provide professional services that you can purchase as well.

I got involved after the initial setup was done, so I can't say if that was complex or not. The pieces that we're doing where we're setting up content switches and stuff like that, that seems to be really straightforward. I didn't even have to take training to work on it!

I have not actually used any of the competitor products.

I would recommend that they really look at it. It's a good product. It really helps. Initially, I would also recommend that they consider using some consulting help from their firm to get it set up, because like I said, I wasn't involved there, but I know we did use that.

When I look to work with a vendor like this, I look for vendors that are responsive, certainly ones that have a good reputation, and ones that when you get their products, they actually do what they tell you they're going to do.

I rated F5 Big-IP three and a half stars, because I seldom rate anything five stars. The F5 interface is easy to use, but not everything is intuitive. Some training is necessary to understand how everything works together.