Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

We use LoadMaster for load balancing our Exchange, Skype for Business, LDAP, Citrix, and SharePoint solutions. We have virtual services setup for traffic originating from inside and outside our network and can manage them separately.

These sites each have certificates and we can update and manage them in one place, which is really helpful with our wildcard certificate that applies to multiple services. We also use the load balancers to manage some security protocols we want to allow or deny per application.

We are able to take balanced servers offline for maintenance without interruption or late nights. This is very helpful to role out things like Windows Updates to our Exchange servers and put them back into the mix, monitoring for logs or user helpdesk tickets for issues before rolling them out to the other servers.

We can even make protocol changes per real servers and watch for their influence on traffic to that server specifically. We have done this many times for older security protocols we want to block such as old RC4, SSL, and TLS.

One of the most valuable features I like is the ability to block specific cipher suites like RC4, and older protocols like SSL 3.0. We were also able to block TLS1.3 as it was causing issues with Android phones connecting to Skype and we could do that with one checkbox in one place.

Another nice feature is the ability to introduce new servers into an application without the need to do interruptive forklift changes to our most critical applications.

It is also easy to apply our wildcard certificate in one place and it is instantly used by all of the sites that point to it at once.  

The only thing I have struggled with is setting up automatic backups. When the job runs, it doesn't seem to do anything and the backup file never shows up in the destination folder.  When I run a manual backup it works fine, but it just dumps the file to my local downloads folder. Otherwise, all of the features that it offers work well for us and it hasn't yet let us down.

We have been using LoadMaster for the past four years.

The product is very stable! We never had an outage in the four years that I've been with the company.

We have been able to manage about 20 virtual services at our highest with two LoadMasters and performance-wise they were easily able to handle the load, even though most of our sites use certificates at the LoadMaster and real-server level.

Technical support is always great for me. They respond quickly when a case is opened online and I have always had a very knowledgeable agent when I cold call them. It does not take them 30 minutes to figure out what we have set up, they always diagnose and resolve quickly for me.

Kemp was our first product to use.

It was straightforward once we understood the setup, and the support was a great help.  

Our in-house team was responsible for deployment.

We are a hospital and none of our patient applications run through our load balancers, so ROI isn't calculated.

This product was in place before I started with the company.

I would advise that you use the virtual appliances if you can. We did have a hardware failure twice on our original physical appliances and it is a bit of a vulnerability to go down to one LoadMaster while the other one is in the shop.

I can't think of any services I would like to add, as I haven't come across a situation where I wanted it to do something that it couldn't do.

It's been a great reliable product for us, and I would recommend it to anyone!

For one major customer, we installed the Kemp Loadmaster as before this I was in security and firewall. But it was requested by Microsoft that there needs to be a Load Balancer in front of the exchange platform. So Kemp is used as a Load Balancer.

From my personal experience, many firewalls provide Load Balancing functionalities, but Kemp Loadmaster has a lot of features and functionalities like what you can configure. So there are a lot of features but we use only five percent of it. 

They were still in the process of development, and for example, we set it up in a cluster. So it was one logistical unit built out of two physical devices. And the expected behavior, which I know from other devices, will be formed into a logic cluster. It's that you configure one unit. Then you bring the second unit into this cluster with the already configured primary unit. So the secondary box pulls all the configured ones from its neighbor, does everything automatically, and then synchronizes with this primary neighbor. And then it works, like, one logical unit. And this didn't work with the Kemp's initially, where they caused a lot of issues when building up a cluster, so there were some specials on how to set this up. When we built or set them up for the first time and the months afterward with no new software releases, there were a couple of problems, but in the end, they worked fine. So, they developed a lot and learned from what they've responded to, what we responded to them, and what needs fixing.

 I have been using the solution since 2015. 

It is a stable solution. We do not have many users using the solution only one customer is left who uses virtual Loadmasters and the solution is working stable. 

The technical support team is good. I rate them nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward as they have good documentation.

The price of the solution is cheap. 

My advice is on what they are already using. For example, if it's in a Data Center customer and he already has some security devices and servers. And I would ask him what kind of functionality you want if this can already be set up in a firewall because I'm working very much with FortiGate Firewalls, which also provide load-balancing functionalities. But only up to a specific level, and if it's simple load balancing, round drop into two servers, then you can do it with the firewall. So you don't need an extra device like a dedicated load balancer. But when it comes to load balancing for an exchange platform or another. For the same customer, we replaced the Microsoft TMG with Kemp LoadMaster. Then you have to deal with things and features. For this, you need then this dedicated load to balance the device. So it depends on the functionalities that one requires. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We currently utilize the Kemp LoadMaster VLM-500 series virtual appliances in our VMware environment. Initially, we were running with only a single appliance, but recently added a second to allow for High Availability pairing between them.

Our primary use for the LoadMaster appliances is to provide load balancing between our two Microsoft Exchange servers in our Office 365 hybrid environment. This has allowed us to obtain redundancy between them, rather than having a single point of failure for our email environment.                   

Before we implemented the Kemp LoadMasters into our Microsoft Exchange environment, we were operating our SMTP relay and OWA traffic directly to the Exchange server itself. This put us in a bad spot when it came to patching and maintenance, as well as when we had service-impacting Exchange issues occur on the server. 

By implementing load balancing via our Kemp LoadMaster, we were able to add an additional Exchange server into our environment, which allowed us to failover manually for maintenance, as well as have a backup for unexpected issues

The most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster. We have never run into any service-impacting issues with the appliance itself, but having a second one allows us to reduce the downtime associated with maintenance upgrades to zero. 

I also appreciate the online licensing feature, which lets us update and install licenses on the appliances by simply logging into our KempID account. It was nice not to have to fuss with licensing and key file download/uploads.

So far, the only hitch we have run into is that would have been nice to have an easier method to add allow/whitelist entries into the Access Control lists for virtual services. 

Following an upgrade, we inadvertently lost all of our Access Control whitelist entries on one of our virtual services. Thankfully we had a backup of them, but to plug them back in, we had to enter them all manually. This ended up being a bit of a pain.

It would be great if there was a way to upload a .CSV file of ACL entries into the access control list, rather than having to add them one at a time.

We've been using Kemp LoadMaster for approximately five years.

We ran a single (non-redundant) LoadMaster appliance in our VMware environment for close to five years with zero outages caused by it, so I am very impressed with the stability of KEMP's devices. The only reason we explored adding a second appliance for High Availability was to make maintenance easier.

We've had other virtual appliances in the past that had to be rebooted occasionally, but that is not the case with the Kemp LoadMaster. They are rock solid in terms of stability.
 

We so far have not come anywhere near utilizing the total throughput of the appliances we have. They have no problems keeping up.

The customer service was great! They helped me to quickly resolve two licensing-related issues with our additional appliance purchase.

We did not previously use load balancing, Kemp was our first choice.

The initial setup is a breeze and is well documented.

It was implemented in-house using only Kemp documentation and no outside support.

Pricing for the perpetual licensing was fair to us for the features and ease of use we received.

We also evaluated Citrix NetScaler.

The VLM appliances boot insanely quickly, which is really impressive. During power cycles, we only drop between two and three pings to the devices.

My primary use case for this solution is load balancing and application load balancing.

The feature I find most valuable is load balancing with different algorithms.

In my opinion, the layer seven loads balancing that we're mainly using for web servers, doesn't seem to pick up when there are issues at the application level. I am not sure if this is due to poor configuration or not, but I think that the stability could be improved.

I have been using this solution since 2019.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

When it comes to the maintenance and support of this solution, we have one person dedicated to solving these issues from Kemp Resources that knows our environment and setup.

We used NLP, which is not in the same leak. That's a Microsoft inbuilt network load balancer, but it's not in the same leak. It doesn't do the application-level low balancing.

My impression is that the initial setup process is quite straightforward and decent. The only part that was tricky was the global server load balancing.

Our model of deployment is on-premises.

The deployment was done with assistance from Kemp resources based in our country.

Regarding the pricing of this solution, I would say it's somewhere in the middle because at the bottom you have free solutions and at the top the most expensive ones.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would advise other people trying to use this solution to go ahead and try to use it as some use cases are quite complex. Our use case is straightforward.

I have worked with Kemp products for at least 10 years, as a consultant. In most cases, they are used for load balancing Exchange environments, but also as reverse proxies for other workloads such as Skype for Business, ADFS, etc.

The customer environments vary greatly. In most scenarios, it’s up to 2,000 users but in some cases more than 30,000. My last case involving Kemp was an Exchange 2016 site-resilient solution with 12 servers for 35,000 mailboxes.

Kemp Loadmaster gives our customers an easy and cheap way of load-balancing their workloads and adding reverse proxy for added security. With Kemp 360 Central, they get a nice overview of their Kemp products and an easy way to upgrade firmware on all devices from a single interface.

Kemp products are extremely stable and meet most of my customers' needs for an ADC solution. My customers appreciate the attractive pricing, stability. and user-friendly interface. The more advanced features such as WAF are rarely required by our customers.

Their virtual products are easy to install and easy to configure.

There are plenty of features that are lacking in my opinion:

• The auth website of ESP is really lacking. It’s not responsive (mobile friendly) and the procedure of changing the website is difficult. We tend to avoid using pre-auth for that reason, and it's really a shame.
• Several elements of the GUI need work. For example, if you have many content switches, it’s difficult to find the ones you need. And where is the search feature?
• If you want logging for SMTP traffic, you have to enable ESP, which requires you to define allowed IP addresses. That’s irritating, to say the least.
• Using the GUI to view log files is tedious. A nice log parser would help.
• It lacks an officially supported, well-written SCOM Management Pack.

Kemp support is great. You always get qualified assistance and the support engineers are friendly and helpful. You can find loads of information on the support website, including deployment guides for almost any workload.

I rate it at eight out of 10. There are many features that are missing or poorly implemented and things that you simply cannot do. The product is very much “as is”, and people need to be aware of that. If you don’t want these limitations, there are other products on the market, but they are typically a bit more expensive. Kemp products are very good load-balancers but are lacking in features compared to its competitors.

Previously, we were using the Microsoft TMG server as a proxy to protect our Exchange server. We recently decided to upgrade the Exchange server, but the MS TMG server support had expired. I was looking for a solution that could provide a similar function.

While I was talking to a consultant, they recommended the Kemp load balancer. On top of the proxy server, I also configured Exchange with DAG, so we needed load balancing as well. After reviewing the product, we installed it and it's doing a great job.

Our primary requirement is to load balance and protect the Exchange active sync and OWA requests. My requirement was only for a proxy, but it provided us load balancing as well. This means that my overall solution is more robust and reliable.

In addition, the software is tiny and can be managed using the web portal, which we didn't have before. This means that managing the software is very easy. It also shows live usage and load on the server, which is really helpful. Their tech support is also really helpful if you need help or add any new rules. I am still exploring the product and planning on using it for more. 

1. Installation: The software looks simple but can provide very complex solutions. The installation is really easy if you have a virtual environment (e.g. VMware).
2. Configuration: The configuration is really easy and the web portal is self-explanatory.
3. Features: Proxy and load balancing are valuable features. We are only using it for Exchange load balancing, and it works great.
4. Tech support: Their technical support is excellent. We have 24-hour tech support. They are very knowledgeable and ready to help.
   

I have not seen a product that is as simple to use as this.

The only thing that I miss is that the TMG server was giving me live information about who is connected and what is the request about. Details include the username, etc. I know Kemp gives you some live load info, but not the authentication data unless I am not aware of it.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about ten months.

It is very stable.

They have multiple tiers of licensing and you can upgrade it easily. I updated my license without any hiccups.

Their customer service and tech support are excellent.

Their technical support team leads you in the right direction. If we have a question about the features then they help configure them as well.

I did use the Microsoft TMG server, but its tech support expired and is no longer available.

Since I was not familiar with the product, it seemed complex. With the help of their tech support, I now understood it and find that it's really simple. 

I took some assistance from the vendor and they helped with installing it. This is something that I could have done if I had referred the documentation. They also did the basic configuration. The next configuration was done with the help of tech support.

The cost of the solution is very low compared to the ROI. 

The installation and setup are really easy if you refer to the documentation. Or, you can pay a maximum of two hours for a consultant and they can help. The vendor's tech support is really helpful, as well.

I did not evaluate other options. This product was suggested by my consultant and I trust him.

I love this product ad definitely recommend it to others. I know that it can do much more than I use it for. So far, I have not looked into other features but I am planning on expanding the usage in near future.

I am getting some updates from them about added features to the product.

I will be working on a few more projects and planning on using it for these.

We use LoadMaster for application load balancing.

LoadMaster is easy to deploy and understand. 

I want to have the ability to pull a particular server. The DevOps portion was challenging for me, like if I needed to redirect from one IP to another URL. I needed to look that up, and the knowledge base is not well organized. When I look for information about Kemp on the Internet, I don't find many articles or anything like that.

I have used LoadMaster for about four years.

LoadMaster is highly stable.

LoadMaster is suitable for enterprise businesses. 

I rate Kemp support nine out of 10. Kemp support is good, but LoadMaster is highly stable, so we don't have many issues. We contacted them only once. 

Positive

The deployment doesn't take much time. It's easier if you have a VM. The hardware takes some time to connect. It hardly takes an hour to deploy if you have everything configured. Kemp is easier to maintain compared to Cisco. 

LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.

I rate Kemp LoadMaster nine out of 10. 

Our primary use is to provide application load balancing for inbound SMTP mail and webmail for Microsoft Exchange.

We have also used the product to load balance Citrix applications and delivery controllers. In our Citrix environment, it is much easier to implement, manage, and use versus Citrix's own Netscaler that we have used in the past.

It fixed our issue with internal webmail and SMTP overload. The product works exactly as advertised and we are thrilled with it. We now have webpage acceleration and can even load balance geographically with virtual boxes in our Microsoft Azure space.

Kemp basically has taken the overloading of one of our servers and now spreads it across three servers without any hiccups. We have excellent performance, see real data for our connections, and have no complaints from our end users. That is a very big help for us!

The user interface is very easy to work with. We did not have to hire outside services to implement what we figured out ourselves and saved plenty of money.

Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for 10 years.

We have had zero stability problems, ever!

It works well.  You can make them an HA pair or put in larger units if required with an easy upgrade path moving the configuration from one bx to another.

We made one phone call and the problem was resolved, immediately. We had a resolution in 12 minutes!

My understanding is the company is built from engineers who left a competitor and took what people complained about at the original company and made it into a better product. Their support always picks up within minutes. In this day and age, sitting around waiting for techs to pick up the phone is a draining task! I do not like companies that have poorly trained engineers who don't pick up the phone!

Their support team is based in the US and that helps us as well. They seem to understand that we only call if there is a problem we cannot solve. Their engineers are really well trained and understand the root of the problem immediately, almost every time. Again, it's hard to complain about this product as we love it!

We tried a few products and they were expensive and overly complicated.

The initial setup was very easy. The configuration took about 20 minutes through a web browser.

We implemented and deployed in-house.

For about $2,500, we have already made our money back!

At $2,500 USD, this is absolutely a fantastic buy for the money!

We went with Kemp after trying other products like the Netscaler, the F5 solutions, and a few other lesser-known vendors. The Kemp solution gave us everything in the box without having to pay for any additional licenses.

Overall, the product has covered what we needed and even offered some additional features.

It's really hard to say what can be improved when we do not have any complaints, to begin with. I just have to say that even Microsoft named Kemp their preferred load balancer for Microsoft Exchange in the past.