F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

LTM: Load balancing, SSL offloading, iRules, iApp,

LTM has been able to demonstrate an immediate return on investment, reducing the cost of server estate upgrades (both in terms of the numbers of required tin, reduced service impact through upgrades, server/website availability managed up to near 100% through redundancy management, improved human resource management (moving OOH work into daylight, reducing operational budget requirements)

LTM – the product is fine and all features that I have deployed have proven to be stable. TMOS release schedule is very dynamic. Major releases (9-10, 10-11) could have been made easier if configuration migration assistants had been more finessed prior to release.

4 years

No major issues with deployment. Care must be taken with infrastructure deploys – close engagement is required with Network Support and Firewall Support areas, but once the platforms are stable, module deployment is very simple. As per my previous comment, moving from release to release can be complicated by things like bigpipe command deprecation (or removal: thank you v11!!), especially if a large iRule base has been developed on the modules.

At the module level, no. They are not as stable as System Z, but they are not far off. Hardware can be a little more susceptible to failure at the component level.

None. Appliance based options (physical and virtual), blended with Viprion/vCMP mean that these solutions have been able to scale to support enterprise class ADC offerings.

Customer Service: First class. F5 have demonstrated a willingness to support us through all issues, from architecture, deployment BAU support and high incidents. I can’t recommend them and their product offering highly enoughTechnical Support: Again, first class. It can sometimes be challenging to find even support partners with the requisite knowledge of the most cutting edge features, but only because F5 seem to develop at such a blistering rate.

No. F5 was a virgin solution to a point problem and quickly grew to a central position in the management of our enterprise infrastructure and digital tier by demonstrating quickly a value contribution made to our live service offering.

Straightforward and complex. Infrastructure setup on the boxes themselves was straightforward, although challenges in working with Network/Firewall departments made the exercise slightly more interesting. Basic LTM configuration OOB is very easy. IRules demand considerably more time and attention to develop properly.

In house, and I would rate their level of expertise as of the very best, since it was myself and a single colleague that built the entire infrastructure.

Significant and immediate.

Full analysis of the ADC space was undertaken, evaluating all competitors in the GMQ. All were discounted because of the vast distance between technologies and their capabilities. F5 was the clear and only choice for us.

Look to Enterprise Architecture before striking a key. These boxes are multiply capable, so allowing development through capability can lead to hugely complex deployments. There is (almost) nothing these boxes can’t do, including providing “tactical” solutions to application issues. Left unconstrained by a robust Architecture model, these boxes WILL grow like topsy, and the complexity of the solutions demanded by any business hungry for rapid delivery will grow into a box of fixes that only SME-level network/security/F5 technicians can manage on even a day-to-day basis. Make sure that the Enterprise Architecture model is strong and well-defined, and stick to it like glue.

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.

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.

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.

We often use the Citrix ADC and F5 BIG-IP LTM together, because they have similar features. But, normally, we use Citrix solutions because we are Citrix providers in Bangkok, so we're not usually working with F5. However, there are some projects where we deploy F5 alongside Citrix or substitute it for the Citrix solution. 

F5 could improve the rule-setting capabilities in the GUI, and they need to simplify web management. For example, the menus in the Citrix GUI are easier to navigate, with a clean structure and layout. It helps you navigate and find what you're looking for, but some of the menus in the F5 GUI are not very intuitive. You're doing the same task, but sometimes it's on the left, sometimes on the right, etc. It should all be on the same setup group menu or something like that. 

I've been working with BIG-IP LTM for almost 10 years. 

I think F5's tech support may be better than Citrix's because they mainly focus on the ADC product, but Citrix support covers Hypervisor, XenMobile, FAS, and ADC. And from my experience, sometimes, we face some issues that Citrix cannot handle. In our first year, Citrix support was not very good, but in the second year, it was okay.

Each product can be simple or complex to set up in its own way, but Citrix setup is more straightforward overall. Citrix doesn't have any restriction on modules or on features, so the features are exactly the same whether it's a small or large deployment. Only the performance is different, but everything else is the same.

I can't say much about the price because our sales department handles pricing. I'm a technical engineer, but I can say that all of these products are in the same price range.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM nine out of 10. You can't go wrong with F5 because F5 and Citrix ADC are like the most advanced BMW in the market. So if what you need is deployment, localizing, high availability, and web balancing for your web server application server, both products can give you the same results. Both are good.

I am not the F5 administrator so I don't use all of the features. I primarily perform daily operations such as checking statistics and deploying new virtual servers.

Our deployment is not very complicated, from my point of view. The HTTP and HTTPS load balancing mechanisms are the core functionality for me. I have done things like created new virtual servers, changed the load balancing, and looked at statistics, but I have not looked into the security features, API gateways, and other features because that is the responsibility of other departments. As a pure network engineer, I think the box is performing very well.

I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing. As long as you know what you're doing, it does everything you want it to do.

Technical support is somewhat slow and could be improved.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP for the past two years.

My experience with technical support has come from two or three tickets that I have raised over the past two years. I would rate them a six or seven out of ten. I'm not sure if my colleagues have faced the same issues, but I have experienced delays in response, especially when I opened a case for iRules. It took them about a month and a half to get me to the point.

One of the reasons it took as long was because they considered this to be a problem for professional services, and not technical support. As such, it was not marked as urgent.

F5 was the first load balancer that I worked on.

The provisioning of the box from A to Z is of medium difficulty. It is not very complicated, nor very easy. I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of provisioning it for the first time.

Compared to using open-source products, the prices are not cheap.

Although we are happy with F5, we are currently evaluating NGINX and Kemp LoadMaster because our F5 boxes are approaching end-of-life. We are running them as demos, conducting a PoC for each to test and see how they run in our environment. There are several things that I have yet to test with these other products.

My understanding is that the support packages and the boxes themselves are not very cheap.

If ultimately we find that the other solutions do not meet our requirements then we will be renewing our service with F5. 

To this point, whatever we have needed has been available out-of-the-box. In our environment, we have not experienced limitations.

In summary, we are happy with the product and for me, it's ideal for HTTP and HTTPS.

Performance-wise, stability-wise, and feature-wise, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are in the security business, basically working in two segments; the first is in the financial sector, with the largest banks in the country, and second, we work with some government organizations and corporate businesses. Only B2B for now, not much retail. We have a few projects in insurance companies. The solution is deployed on-premise in our office and we basically use it for demo and testing purposes. We deploy for our customers both on-premise and on cloud. We are a distribution channel, like a reseller. I'm a channel development manager.

For BIG-IP, I think the most requested functionality is its NetFlow balancing and traffic balancing, as well as its secure access and its optimization of access to applications. The solution is the most requested by our customers, so it's an important direction for our business.

I'd like to see a more intuitive interface. The market now is moving into salvage services, different kinds of services, not only hardware solutions. 

I've been using the solution for four months. 

The product is scalable, we have around 200 users in our company. In terms of our customers, there would probably be over 1,000 users.  We have a huge company, but our department for network security products consists of about 25 people. In half of them, users are the technical specialists.

We're just starting to work on setting up our own support service for clients. We hope that maybe next year we could add support products to our product line also.

We have other vendors in our portfolio, all of them working for performance network, performance optimization, and application implementation. We generally propose a few solutions to our customers. 

We have a technical department with a lot of certified specialists who work on the implementation side of things and we also support some of our departments and external clients. It's not my area of expertise. 

We are planning to expand to other segments in the market, healthcare or logistics or even some FMCG retail companies. We hope the F5 solutions will help us to expand. We intend to continue providing this solution and to involve more partners in the F5 business. I would recommend this solution. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We are primarily using it for load balancing, and with BIG-IQ managing Layer 7 security policies.

We did get good flexibility as well as the capabilities to accept declarative API and create per app dashboard and create a better view on the telemetry dashboard.

• Cloud templates 
• Declarative onboarding
• API service gateway
• Policy-based security management.

Services to be improved: 

• Multi-cloud consistency, like to simplify administration with centralized policies with multi-cloud vendors
• F5 lateral scalability within the container is still restricted.
• Web application firewalls and service mesh would be a nice-to-have feature.
• Drive programmable application with 100% restful API
• Cover deployment
• Monitoring
• Policy-based control. 

Trial/evaluations only.