F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Scalability

Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very scalable. We have quite a few people using it within our organization, from admins to vice presidents. Maintenance is also very minimal.

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Mahmoud-Yassin

Head of IT Infrastructure and Security Operations at United Arab Bank

LTM is highly scalable, especially if you are moving away from hardware appliances. You can go for a VM and follow the basic steps of sizing, etc. and you can buy additional licenses if necessary.

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Ritesh-Bakhru

Major Account Manager at Check Point Software

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is rated around six or seven on a scale of one to ten. The introduction of a chassis-based architecture allows for scalability by accommodating multiple blades within a chassis, providing flexibility in handling traffic. However, individual boxes have limitations, and to scale further, one might need to add switches or replace the box with a larger one.

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Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

November 2024

Free Report: F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews and More

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Rakesh Joshi

General Manager at Seriti Resources

It is scalable. All our customers are enterprise-level.

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reviewer2129115

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

If there is a need to scale, there is a need to replace the hardware to allow for additional scalability.

Our department is between fifteen to twenty people as operators, but we are selling to half a million customers using the solution.

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

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Mohammed Abdul Rahman

F5 Consultant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

In terms of scalability, there are some limitations on the architecture level in F5. For example, F5 has a limit of eight Virtual Control Planes (VCPs) per hardware configuration. It means expansion and scalability require additional hardware resources. I would rate scalability a five out of five. Only I am involved with this solution at my company.

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Joel Soares De Jesus

Operator at Capgemini Engineering

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a scalable solution.

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reviewer1897710

Principle Architect (retired recently) at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is scalable. That's one of the reasons I always went for it. Some of the clients I have worked with have been Fortune 100 companies with thousands and thousands of servers they needed front-ended.

Some of these sites had multiple thousands of web instances that needed to be load balanced. We were also doing both local and global load balancing. We'd use a global load balancer that would point to local load balancing that would port it out within a specific data center.

These clients had millions of end users. I believe that nearly all of those organizations ended up increasing their load balancing platform environment.

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reviewer1706595

Senior Network Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

It is scalable, but we didn't really need to scale. It met all the performance requirements we had. So, we had no issues where we were not able to add something.

Currently, its usage is quite low, but it's not because of the product. It's because of how our company works. In other words, how much we need to use it. It's not used a lot, and we don't plan to expand its usage.

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reviewer1739430

Senior Technical Consultant at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

For scaling, there has to be a lot of planning when we need to scale up F5. It is a bit complex.

We cannot easily scale up the LTM. We cannot put an additional box into the production without any downtime with the user experience. So adding the box or scaling up has to be done with proper planning.

We have an extensive network of users across Office 365, SharePoint, custom applications, Skype for Business, et cetera.

Some customers who have been using the solution for the last six years are wanting to migrate or wanting to upgrade their chassis to the newer version. It is typically if they have a station-hungry application to deploy, like Teams, where this is quite a useful product. With F5, the transition is quite smooth.

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Saneesh Pv

Network Security Specialist at GBM

I handle almost a hundred-plus customers who are using this solution. The solution comes in different form factors. The high-end models are scalable owing to their ability to cater to certain requirements. So, since there are different models available, the solution is scalable.

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Mohamed Intissar

Tax Department at a government with 10,001+ employees

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a scalable product, but my company has yet to try scaling it because there's no need.

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reviewer1589751

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

In terms of how many users we have using it, for the end user, all our customers go through the F5, so they are using it in terms of service. In terms of our engineers and how many people use it, that depends. If you're deploying it or you're in operations, like I am, there are hundreds of engineers and internal users.

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Orphé DJEDJERO

Design and Conception Engineer at SFR

Although BIG-IP's solutions are scalable for most purposes, it's not always scalable for certain scenarios, in my opinion. From an API perspective, though, it is quite scalable.

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Thomas Hejula

Senior IT Engineer at Lumeris

I haven't thought of production workloads on it yet. I don't know how the performance is going to be in terms of CPU memory, but I was told by other people because of what we're doing on it, it could be hard to scale. So, we may have to end up buying more because we will be encrypting and decrypting. We have to inspect that traffic, so that will be CPU intensive. Therefore, one instance may not be enough for us, as we may be spinning up multiples across Multi-AZs.

We will be just stacking our costs. Granted, it is virtualization, and you can only get so much out of it. However, I haven't put true production workloads through it. I have only done my testing, and I am concerned a bit about these factors and how they may drive our costs even more, because I will have to spin up more WAFs to accommodate for high CPU and memory loads.

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reviewer2407128

Information Security Consultant-Risk at a computer retailer with 11-50 employees

It is a scalable product. In some environments that I worked on, it ranged from 1000 to 10,000 normal users. It was deployed across multiple locations with multiple deployments.

I managed LTM for scaling network resources during peak times. If I had multiple servers hosting the same servers, I could segment traffic across these servers during peak times. Rather than going to one server, the traffic can go to two or three servers to ensure fast delivery and keep the servers healthy, even during peak times.

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Kodanda Ramji C.S

Manager | Engineering | Cloud Managed Services at Sify Technologies

The tool is scalable. It meets the requirements.

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Saurabh-Pal

Sr. Security Specialist at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

It is scalable. I would say it's around eight or nine out of ten. Our clients are at the enterprise level.

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Nirav_Shah

Technical Solutions Architect at MindTree

From a scalability point of view, this solution is not really up to the mark. The on-demand requirements or on-demand scalability options are not good.

We have close to 5,000 applications hosted on F5 that are delivered.

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Eric Foote

Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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John Bayangos

Lead Infrastructure Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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MahesaPutra

Presales at Efficient IT Systems Ltd

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.

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MahesaPutra

Presales at Efficient IT Systems Ltd

The solution's scalability is good. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Around 50-100 of our customers use the solution.

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Michael-Yuen

COO at International Household Retail Company Ltd

Our whole IT department is using the solution with some application teams. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in the IT department.

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UmeshKumar2

Senior System Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

LTM is scalable.

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Bachir Elsitt

Network Security Engineer at Data Consult

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.

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Yudi Aritonang

Co-Founder and CEO at PT Eugenea Kreasi Utama

We have approximately 115 people in our organization who use this solution.

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reviewer1721355

Security Technical Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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Abduh Rumfot

It Security Consultant at juke

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.

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reviewer1573344

Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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Satish Agarwal

Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Robert Smith

DevOps Manager at TaxACT

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.

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Walid Mouamar

Network and Security Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is scalable.

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reviewer1505658

Sr. Network Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very scalable. We have recently expanded the cluster to five nodes and I am running in an active scenario. I did the upgrade live and it did not require any downtime.

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MariosChristodoulou

Chief Information Officer at F.P. eSafe Solutions LTD

The scalability is great. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so easily.

We have about 2,500 users on it currently.

We do plan to increase usage in the near future.

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reviewer1433067

Director of Network Strategies and Technologies at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

While we never really got around to scaling the solution just yet, there is horizontal scalability that is on offer that seems very good.

This is being deployed in a service provider environment. Therefore, it'll be impactful to all of our customers. However, I would say as far as internal support users, we have a team of probably ten that'll be supporting this product once it's launched in production.

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Guojun Jin

Staff Engineer at UbiNavi

No issues.

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AhmedYoussef1

Network Security Consultant at Westcon-Comstor

I have clients that have approximately 5,000 users using the solutions and others with 40,000 users.

When we increase the services we have to then increase the usage of the solution, we put more virtual F5 devices in the cloud.

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Kok KeongLow

Head of Presales at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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

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SagarPatel

Senior ICT Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is scalable and secure, so we propose this solution to customers with bigger environments, e.g. those in the government.

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Rajnish Niraj

Founder at Fencesense

50 percent of my customers are using this solution.

F5 BIG-IP LTM is a scalable solution.

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UzochikwaEnunwa

Enterprise architect at Kyndryl

It is very scalable. We have thousands of users.

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it_user858369

Assistant Vice President at Nagarro

It is very scalable.

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it_user109836

Team Leader Mainframe & Webservices at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

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Georges Samaha

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We only encountered issues with small appliances, 2000s, when we needed to add more than two modules...

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MufeedSiaj

Network Security Presales Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user521841

Head of Data Centers Operations at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is scalable and should meet our future requirements.

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Roni Wijaya

Vice President of It Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

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

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Priyesh MP

Solution Architect at Softcell Technologies Limited

It is scalable.

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reviewer1552263

Sr. SAP Portfolio Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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

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Network8776

Network Presales Manager at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

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.

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Flight9875

Works at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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ChiefSecd99d

Chief Security Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user223881

Network Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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MahesaPutra

Presales at Efficient IT Systems Ltd

The solution is scalable.

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reviewer1277325

Specialist in Communication and Network Security at a security firm with 11-50 employees

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.

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reviewer1448481

Network Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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Solutiond87c

Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user521838

Solution Architect/Application Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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ipmplspr538920

Security Governance at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Not so far.

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reviewer1633455

Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

It is not scalable. It is a licensed product. They are coming up with some scalable options, but for existing products, throughput is limited. Currently, if you have a 200 Mbps license, then it can go to a maximum of 200 Mbps. If you want it to go further than that, then you have to buy a new license.

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PradeepKumar11

IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a scalable solution and we have not had any limitations. We have approximately 3,000 users.

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it_user1356177

IT Security Engineer at a cloud solution provider with 11-50 employees

This solution scales with ease. You can add equipment, reduce equipment, add configs, it is very flexible.

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Hilman Gunawan

System Engineer at PT Nusantara Compnet Integrator

Scalability is good. We use it for active and passive, and we also do some TCMP.

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reviewer1465533

Channel Development Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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Thameem Ansari

Senior solution architect at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

This is a scalable solution.

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Joshua Cruz

Associate Systems Engineer at Frontline Education

We have over 12 applications that we use it for with about 300 servers which are connected up using this load balancer.

We're a big company. We do like the on-premise version. However, we are looking into AWS servers to help us scale for larger avenues as well.

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Mahmoud-Yassin

Head of IT Infrastructure and Security Operations at United Arab Bank

This solution is scalable.

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reviewer1788060

Senior Network and Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

BIG-IP can scale horizontally or vertically because it's a blade system. If you need more hardware on the same appliance, you can put blades on it. They are a bit expensive but work fine. You can create a cluster if you want to scale horizontally and put any hardware you need on it. You can scale as much as you want.

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Md. Robiul Awoul

Deputy manager at Oculin Tech

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a scalable solution.

We have approximately nine people using this solution in my organization.

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reviewer1352181

Associate CSA at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is scalable, especially in the cloud. On-prem, it may need additional licensing or an additional appliance. That depends on how large and what the use case is specifically for the customer.

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AhmedIsmael

Network & Telecom Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is not scalable. We have about 2,000 users in our organization.

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Jonathan Urrea

Security Professional Services at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Whether you can scale easily or not depends on the device and the sizing. For example, if you have an E 2000 or I 4000, you might have a lot of traffic and the device cannot handle it very well. Scalability with the performance was the one issue that affected us this year.

Most of the customers that we have are enterprises. They are banking and insurance customers. They're quite large, which is why we need the scalability that we do.

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Girish Vyas

Architect - Cloud Serviced at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

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it_user147228

Senior Security Specialist with 1,001-5,000 employees

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. View full review »

reviewer1483797

Service Delivery Engineer - Network Security Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is very scalable.

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reviewer1480176

CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

From our perspective, it is scalable.

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technica696483

Technical Product Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It has that scalability for adding more F5, N + 1.

It's scalable, and it has more functions than a service. At the same time, this device can run access policy manager, it has Web application firewall, datacenter switching to DR sites. It has a modular approach actually. It gives you what you want.

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Rana Mohamed

Product Manager at MCS

It is really awesome. You can scale from one or two servers to hundreds of servers. They have all the modules that a customer needs. You can go for on-premise or cloud deployment. You can have whatever you need.

Our clients are medium and large businesses.

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it_user591900

IT Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

We haven't bumped into scalability issues. The limitation is actually through licensing. Throughput is limited by licensing. We had an error with the license and we reached the limit but we fixed that. But there has never been trouble with the capacity or scalability.

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it_user850398

Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

No issues with scalability.

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Sanja Rakic

Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Most of our clients are medium-sized entities.

For the one customer I typically deal with, there has been no need to scale or expand services. The product can be scaled by adding more licenses if necessary. That said, our clients have everything they need and have not actually done this.

There are also add-ons that come from the ASM if a company is interested in that.

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SaurabhPal

Technical Specialist - Network & Security at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The product can scale quite well. We haven't had any issues. If a company needs to expand it out, they should be able to do so without trouble.

Right now, I'm the only one at the office who uses the product.

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it_user526731

Sr. Network Engineer at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

No.

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Reviewer702843

Director Technology Solutions with 11-50 employees

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.

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reviewer1010148

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The scalability of the solution is good.

We have approximately 20 engineers using the solution.

The solution is extensively being used and we plan to increase usage.

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Sathiya Shunmugasundaram

Site Reliability Engineer at Apple

Scalability has been great. We have thousands of severs. F5 has scaled very well.

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reviewer1441791

Head Of Technology at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

This is a scalable product. There are three people who manage it, but it's applicable to the entire organization, so there are approximately 1,500 users.

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Director1e9d

Director Public Sector at Smart Tronix Inc

The scalability is awesome. Our environment is thousands upon thousands of instances in AWS.

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it_user717243

Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

No.

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it_user848262

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

They have the potential to scale in better way.

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it_user799992

Senior Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I haven't done any upgrades yet, but it is scalable to some extent.

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Technicab017

Technical Team Leader at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It's easier to scale.

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Hilman Gunawan

System Engineer at PT Nusantara Compnet Integrator

The scalability of the solution depends on the sizing of the network. Generally, the scalability is quite good.

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reviewer1418577

Senior IT Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

My impression is that it's scalable.

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Develope0fe0

Developer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It seems to be a very scalable product.

As for the size of our environment, we have our own data center, but it's a small data center.

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Hu231Anly367

Thermicien with 51-200 employees

Scalability seems fine.

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it_user617790

Games, Apps and Web Developer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Not to date.

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it_user860436

Ingeniero at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We don't need additional features to grow out the platform.

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it_user750990

Network Security Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

No issues with scalability.

View full review »

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

November 2024

Free Report: F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.