Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

Our primary use case is to synchronize mail to mobile devices and specifically, the Outlook application on laptops.

I have a virtualized environment that contains Exchange Server 2016 and I need a service in the DMZ that knows how to handle emails that have arrived, as a reverse proxy product.

My employees are using mobile phones like Samsung. They need to be able to send and receive emails anywhere with their mobile phones and laptops, so now, for about one year, we are working with Kemp and the users are satisfied. There is no complaining, as they had done before.

Using Kemp LoadMaster has solved the problems that I was having with my previous solution, PineApp.

The most valuable features are synchronizing email with mobile devices and synchronizing with Outlook.

We have experienced at least one problem with stability, although it was fixed with an upgrade.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for one year.

The product is stable and very easy to implement. Since it was installed, there has been one small problem that has been resolved in a version upgrade.

The product does its job for the users and I do not receive any complaints.

I recently had one small glitch when syncing to an iPhone. I received support that was courteous, polite, professional, and fast.

Prior to this, I had a product from Cybonet called PineApp.

It is supposed to perform as a  reverse proxy and synchronize emails to mobiles phone and Outlook but I had a lot of issues and it did not work smoothly. I asked them to suggest to me what to do and they told me that they can only handle 20 to 30 users. They said that if I wanted me then I need to purchase another dedicated product.

I was not satisfied and this caused me to replace it.

As I mentioned earlier the installation went smoothly without any issues with the help of the company support

I was helped by the KEMP support team and they were very professional and would be happy to work with them

The product definitely provides what the organization needs and its cost is reasonable considering the value it brings.

At this time, the only features that the organization needs are the synchronization of emails to mobile devices and Outlook, so overall, we are satisfied with this product.

I would definitely recommend the product to my friends.

The primary use case of this solution was to replace our Citrix Netscaler and help us load balance traffic for solutions such as Citrix, Exchange, RDP, as well as for web servers using HTTP and SMTP.

We have been able to manage several applications as well as run certain services such as Exchange through the WAF. This is with it all being on one screen instead of jumping to several different windows to see how everything is configured. It helps out.

The pre-configured templates help our technicians correctly modify the services, which is another benefit.

We are most impressed with the ease of use and great support.

The features we have found most valuable would be the Kemp 360, which helps narrow down the logging.

You can filter and review which IPs are causing issues.

I also like how there are templates for various types of technologies, such as RDP, Exchange, etc. It helps tremendously when making sure that everything is configured.

I definitely think that the WAF can be improved. We have had several issues for which, at times some our services that were being run through the kemp would stop working. It was strange because everything showed green. Their first solution was to enable/disable the WAF and it worked. But then at time it stopped again and it required further investigation with Kemp support in which logs were needed to be turned on and collected to analyze the behavior. 

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for two months.

Stability-wise, so far so good. Sometimes we wish we had a little more notice if something wasn’t working, such as a notification email.

AMAZING! Their support team is US-based and quick to answer, help troubleshoot, solve problems.

We used Citrix Netscaler prior to this product.

The initial setup was straightforward and the support team was also very helpful.

In-house with minimal experience.

Setup is easy, the cost is affordable, and the licensing is quick and simple.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution. 

We use the Kemp Loadmaster to load-balance enterprise-wide applications that require high-availability. We also wanted to make sure the performance and throughput meet the needs of the usage of our applications.

These applications include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Microsoft SharePoint (2010, 2013), file sharing servers, multiple public-facing websites, multiple internal websites, on-premise IT Service Management applications, and others.

The LoadMaster handles both production and development environments for these applications.

The Kemp LoadMaster was very easy to deploy and we initially deployed without needing much tech support help. The management is very intuitive and can easily be used by techs without needing extensive training to use.

The LoadMaster met all of the features and performance we were looking for at a very affordable price. We were also looking to lessen the real estate rack space in our data centers and really wanted a virtual solution that will work with our Hyper-V environment.

Having a Hyper-V image that we easily deployed to multiple Hyper-V clusters allowed us to achieve high availability with the LoadMaster.

The templates provided by Kemp for well-known applications like Exchange and SharePoint make these applications very easy to deploy. When the templates are used, there is not much left to configure and they just work!

I have used and evaluated templates from other load balancing vendors, but still required extra help from a technician just to make the application work correctly. This is a little frustrating sometimes since you would think that the template should just work.

I have not had any issues with any of the LoadMaster templates at all.

Out of the box, the LoadMaster provides real-time statistics regarding connections to the real servers, as well as to the virtual services. We see the number of connections in the last 5/30/60 minutes, and current active connections as well. However, it would be nice if we were able to drill in further to see the actual IP addresses that made up these connections, whether they were coming from the internet or internal, and possibly the option to disconnect certain active connections.

The historical graphs showing CPU metrics and the network is useful, as well. It would be nice if the historical metrics were easily exportable from the interface.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for the past nine years. This was eight years using the hardware-based LoadMaster, and less than a year on the virtual LoadMaster platform.

We like the stability of the LoadMaster setup on high-availability, running two separate Hyper-V clusters. We have tested HA failover of the virtual devices a few times now and failover worked perfectly each time.

Since we are using virtual LoadMasters, we are certain that we can easily scale when needed without needing extra hardware.

Kemp customer service is excellent. When I had submitted a ticket for questions I had, the response was almost immediate and they made sure to always follow up with me just to check that everything was to our satisfaction.

We switched from a prior solution since the LoadMaster provided the features, performance and throughput that we required for a more affordable price point.

The initial setup is very easy since we were provided an image for our hypervisor. Technical documentation was provided and it was very easy to follow and initially configure without needing extra technical help.

We implemented in-house.

Our ROI on the Kemp LoadMaster is very positive.

It is well-priced and licensing is very flexible.

We looked at Radware and F5.

The LoadMaster is very easy to set up, configure, and manage. We have been using it for almost 10 years and are still very happy with this solution.

We use our devices as virtual load balancers for Exchange 2016, primarily.

We have two sites with two LMs at each site in clusters. We also use the devices as global DNS services and reverse proxy/authentication servers for our external users.

Our services are primarily Microsoft products being served. These include Exchange, SharePoint, CRM Dynamics, Skype, and ADFS. We are also looking at implementing websites in the future as required.

SSL offloading is enabled. Our devices are set up in the network as well as the DMZ.

With Kemp, I have been able to implement a global DNS load balancer between two sites for internal and external users with our existing Exchange DAG setup. This has made DR and BCP much easier to manage.

Our previous setup used Microsoft's TMG solution, and when that went end of life we needed to figure out a replacement. Being able to use load balancing, SSL offloading, and Edge Security Packages, all in one service, made my life much easier to manage from a day to day and single pane of glass perspective.

ESP gives us peace of mind because it has taken over from Microsoft's Threat Management Gateway (reverse proxy) solution. It also alerts us if there are attempted security breaches so that we can be sure we are safe.

The DNS Load Balancer makes it so that I don't have to worry about site failures. As it manages both our external DNS and internal DNS queries, we can failover to the individual sites as required. This is true for site failures as well as planned maintenance. 

We also use the Kemp 360 Vision, which monitors our services from an external perspective and alerts us via SMS and email, so I know if things go down. 

We experienced a brief period of instability.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for six years.

I have only had an issue with the solution once in terms of stability. The issue was not an end user-visible issue, and upgrading the O/S fixed the issue right away.

I beleive it's scalable because I can always upgrade my licensing to a unit that handles more requests. 

Service is great, easy to work with, and always responsive.

Prior to Kemp LoadMaster, we used end-of-life products from Microsoft.

The initial setup is straightforward, due to Kemp's support services and available templates and documentation.

We completed the setup in-house.

I believe it is high due to the many services that the solution has been able to provide.

From a cost perspective, Kemp is very competitive and is not hard to justify by any means.

We looked at Citrix Netscaler as well as a solution by A10 Networks.

My advice is to use Kemp's support to help with the initial setup. It is included in the initial cost and it makes sure that best practices are used. Keep up with the support because it's worth it.

I am currently happy with everything.

We use LoadMaster for HA Clustered Pair Load Balancer for primarily Exchange on-premises deployment and all supporting services (SMTP, ActiveSync, Autodiscovery, OWA/EWS, etc.)  Secondarily, for non-Exchange, application-server-based mail routing.

We implemented in 2014 as a dedicated load handling solution for inbound on-prem internal Exchange SMTP. We soon adapted the appliances to handle more tasks such as VIP-based routing to our middleware MTAs, mobile devices via ActiveSync, Outlook Autodiscover services Exchange Web Services & Outlook Web Access.

It has greatly fortified the performance and uptime of our front-door email ingress, simplified and segmented mail routing, and reduced admin overhead for mail issue resolution and troubleshooting.

The ease of the UI has allowed several relatively untrained admins to take over administrative duties, firmware upgrades, service monitoring, issue troubleshooting, and basic maintenance tasks like failover/failbacks.

It has also given us previously lacking visibility into mail flow metrics, service-based volume, connection issue granularity, and high availability.

The Virtual Service setup, maintenance & monitoring, the straightforward setup, ease of configuration changes, and simple investigation of issues are the most valuable features. 

The ability to rapidly and without interruption, redirect traffic from place to place, set up testing environments, and use as a tool to eliminate variables in downstream application/real Servers when they are having issues are also valuable.

The true real-time monitoring of service interruptions downstream have been a very valuable tool for us when troubleshooting end to end transmission issues.

Certificate installations could be simplified and modernized, and allowed to be monitored for expirations/issues.

We had a particular issue where we believed the Kemp LoadMaster was to blame for service disruption of a particular VIP (virtual-IP) based service, based on the supporting evidence. In the end, it was actually expired certificates downstream, which was not the Kemp's fault per se but it would have helped greatly and reduced our time with support if the Kemp had an alert for this type of problem, without needing to search logs/packet capture.

I have been using Kemp LoadMaster for more than seven years.

In 20 years in IT with over a dozen similar products used, it ranks easily in my top 3 for overall uptime and stability of application/IP-based load balancers.

We only use a 2 node cluster but the scalability at the hardware level seems to be mostly effortless. Partners can be added relatively easily.

Scaling up the number of VIPs/services is likewise as effortless. Performance seems very good for the roughly 20 VIP/services we use it for.

Kemp's Support is the best in the business, having opened several tickets with them over the years they have always excelled and never disappointed.

Yes, because we were upgrading the entire organization's Exchange version and we wanted a better, HA Clustered solution to match the Exchange redundancy we had built.

From what I have gleaned it was straightforward but we had a 3rd party set it up for us.

Vendor Team, very high level of expertise. The purchase of this product was suggested solely by him due to his past successes with deploying it.

I have not quantified actual ROI numbers but given the longevity and high-usage of this appliance I would imagine very high, easily our top 15% of IT Infrastructure ROI.

We did hire a 3rd party professional service contractor for the setup, however, he was already used to implement the Exchange build-out. This added some cost to it but may have not been needed since the Kemp design and initial config seems very straightforward.

Purchasers may want to consider this setup expense depending on their own staff confidence level.

We use the Kemp Load balancer with our on-premise Exchange 2016 using two servers on a DAG at different locations. The Kemp load balancer allows us to have a hands-off failover between servers either in a Disaster Recovery model or during upgrades for security patches or service pack updates for the Exchange software.

We are now expanding this for our corporate webserver that will also be hosted at both of our locations. We have more confidence in having on-premise applications than trusting the Cloud. 

Our organization is better protected from an email outage than before. The old process of manually having to redirect Outlook Web Access traffic and Email traffic to a second server is a thing of the past.

I can sleep at night because of the Kemp Load Balancer, just knowing that in case of a failover, the email will keep flowing and our users will have access in the morning.

Having near 100% uptime for email is critical. Without email access, we would lose business

With the move from our second Exchange server to the second data center, the GEO function allows the Kemp LoadMaster / Balancer to work together.

We originally deployed Kemp when we had both Exchange servers at one site. That was good to start with, but as we upgraded to Exchange 2016, we needed to have devices that would handle this increased functionality. The GEO functionality made this happen, allowing the two devices to see each other and determine the failover in either a Disaster Recover of software patch scenario.

I can think of three things that would be nice; First, it would be helpful if the GEO function was built into every device. The cost of the GEO upgrade is not cost-prohibitive but it's something that would be a nice add-in, out of the box.

The second is the throughput. If the device was licensed based on the throughput then we could upgrade hardware to get better transactional throughput.

Third, if they had dual power supply options on the lower end models it would be helpful because I may be a smaller shop with only 35 servers, but I still rely on dual power supplies whenever possible.

Switchcraft has been using Kemp Load balancer for about three years.

Kemp is very stable and we have never had an issue.

You need to upgrade devices to increase the scale.

Support has been easy to deal with. I have only needed to contact them a few times during the initial setup. Once it's been in place and operational, we have not needed to mess with the system, which is a huge advantage.

Kemp was my first experience with load balancers.

The initial setup was easy.

Our partner was great. They had used the devices before, which made it easy.

ROI was immediate, as it gives us peace of mind that email would stay up. Call it insurance.

Set up was easy; nothing is cheap nowadays but it is well worth the cost

We did not look at other solutions, as it was recommended by our Consulting partner on the project.

The Kemp load balancer is well suited for an on-premise Exchange system, either at one location or at two.

It is also suitable to use for balancing web site traffic between systems..

Kemp works well when used with two or more units in a multi-site environment  I have not found a solution that the Kemp will not handle well.

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!

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.