Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

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.

The primary use case of this solution is for load balancing websites, load balancing Citrix solutions, and load balancing Microsoft Dynamics.

This solution has helped us in certain situations that we have had to find a way to work around.

I like the way this solution handles multiple SSLs in different domains while still load balancing. I find that to be a very interesting feature.

It should be more customizable and perhaps more like NetScaler in that regard. Although Kemp is very user-friendly, it lacks a more custom configuration.

I would like to see this solution more customizable in the next release.

I have been using this solution since May of 2019.

This solution is stable. It's pretty good.

This solution's scalability is pretty good.

We have about 200 users in finance, customer service, and IT.

We are using this solution every day and we have plans to increase our usage.

The support is great.

Previously, I had used Microsoft NLB. We switched because it was more difficult to configure and it had many issues.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very intuitive and user-friendly. The application itself is built to be more user-friendly.

It took two days to deploy. It wasn't difficult and it involved checking the configuration and calling support. There was no different kind of strategy.

It only takes one person to deploy and maintain this solution. As the Networking Administrator, I am the person who is responsible.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. Only the main support.

Licensing is yearly and I am going to guess that it is CAN $2000.00.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Check for the complete needs of your entire network system.

In order to configure things, you will have to first draw out your connections before you implement it.

This solution is good and it's reliable but there are things to improve.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our organization provides resources for public safety. For continuous service and support, we need to run our system with high availability and avoid failures or downtime. 

Kemp LoadMaster helps us achieve this goal by utilizing the Kemp LoadMaster virtual appliance in our VMware environment. Kemp LoadMaster allows us to provide load balancing and high availability to our web and API services for internal and public use, making sure that public safety is not put at risk.

Along with making sure public safety is not put at risk, Kemp LoadMaster allows us to keep our web services secure by adding another security layer with its web application firewall and IPS.

Kemp LoadMaster has greatly improved our uptime while reducing the time spent on maintenance of the virtual appliances, allowing the IT team to concentrate on other projects.

Because of the reduced time from the Kemp maintenance, we able to spend more time making sure that the hardware and server software is up to date. Kemp allows us to now have the flexibility of updating and applying firmware or software upgrades that would normally be service impacting to our infrastructure to be done during work hours without any interruptions.

The most valuable feature is the load balancing and allowing for high availability of our web services. If we need a maintenance window to apply updates to any of our infrastructure that would normally be service-impacting or require extensive steps to prevent it from being service-impacting, is now simplified to "it just works".

Also, what makes it very valuable is the fact that Kemp listens to its customer base. You have the ability to request new features and it does not fall on deaf ears. The development team is very responsive and accommodating to their customers.

The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles. The knowledge base that is there is well done, but it would be excellent to see it expanded out. For those fringe installations, technical support is more than willing to assist.

The one thing that I would love to see implemented is the ability for Kemp to automate certificate creation through Let's Encrypt. That way I can cut back on my cost of certificates and also pushes towards a more centralized location for certificate management. 

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for just over one year.

This product is extremely stable. We have the metered license so the Kemp appliance has to phone home monthly to send our statistics for the month and the only issue we have ran into is the phone home feature failed once which could have been caused by an internet hiccup.

It is easy to scale the solution. If needed another load balancer, it's as simple as firing up another LoadMaster VM.

Customer service is fast and responsive. Haven't had to use it very often, if at all. 

We were using Simple Failover, but it was running into issues and we were looking for more of an enterprise solution.

Setup is cake. It is straightforward and easy.

Kemp's team helped with the implementation while I drove the keyboard. Kemp's knowledge and expertise were top notch.

ROI was immediate and gives the peace of mind knowing if something happens to one of my servers, nothing will be seen by the public.

The price is great and the value is definitely there.

We also evaluated F5.

Our primary use for the Kemp LoadMaster is load balancing our exchange and IIS web services to be able to meet the high availability standard for our organization. We get additional security features so there is no need to make these configuration steps on a server again. With the offloading capability, you can even secure servers that normally can't be secured.

Currently, we are using it with our web servers and exchange, for both internal and external access. Also, the reverse proxy is one of the greatest benefits.

We use Kemp to improve the security and availability of our web properties to external customers and partners, as well as a custom banquet application that is accessed over a cloud connection.

The Kemp LoadMaster gives us load balancing/reverse proxy capabilities as well as a web application firewall to protect our web application environment and website.

We use the technology across the entire organization to solve the issue of site performance and availability issues of our applications to external users when booking and managing events.

The most valuable features for us are the Load Balancing and Web Application Firewall, as we have a lot of web applications. It was difficult to meet the high availability without doubling most of the work. With the WAF, we can publish without risking our infrastructure being internet-facing.

The following features are also valuable:

• TLS (SSL) Offload
• Layer 7 Content Switching
• High Availability (Active/Standby)
• Health Checking
• Permit /Deny Access Control Lists
• IP address filtering
• IPsec Tunnel support
• DDoS mitigation, including L7 rate-based attacks
• IPSec VPN to Azure, AWS, vCloud Air public clouds
• Authenticated NTP
  

From my point of view, the only minor thing that needed to be improved is log management. It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event.

Log management is critical for investigating an attack or unwanted behavior. Since they have a lot of logs, it takes a lot of time to look for a specific event. Also, for the WAF, it would be great if they can provide a dashboard or insight dashboard for WAF logs.

other than that there is nothing need to be improved from kemp

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for three years.

very stable, since 3 years we didn't face any issues 

very easy to scale the solution

very helpful technical team

We used to work with Windows NLB, and we switched to Kemp to meet a higher level of stability and quality of service.

straightforward, using the documentation provided by kemp

in-house

This product has good value and features for the money.

Prior to choosing Kemp, we evaluated Zen Load Balancer and NGINX. Comparing price and features, Kemp was the best option for us.

Basically, Kemp covers every critical thing that must be needed to complete the task at hand.

High-availability, reverse proxy and web application firewall (WAF) for IoT devices and back-end web services. We have not fully enabled the web application firewall functionality as of yet, but plan to do so in the coming weeks.  

Easy of Deployment. Application Delivery Controllers are not my company's strong suite. We needed a Microsoft Threat Management Gateway server replacement solution for a customer and were impressed with the simplified deployment of the Kemp LoadMasters.

I am small business and cannot afford dedicated consultants for one specific technology. I am able to leverage existing skillsets to deploy and configure the Kemp LoadMasters.

I do not feel we have enough experience with the product to talk to areas improvement or recommended features release.

Some of the support documentation seems to make assumptions that the person installing or configuring is experienced with the product or concepts. Further research got us through the installation and configuration without any issues.  

No issues.

No issues.

High. They have a very responsive support.

Microsoft Threat Management Gateway. Product is at its end of life.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

For a cloud proof of concept, I reached out to Kemp support to help us with a multi-NIC VM deployment. Their support was fantastic and we were able to get up and running in short order. The downloadable templates were a huge time saver.

In-house.

Saved a third of the costs without sacrificing needed features by going with Kemp.

Download Kemp's VLM trial and take it for a test drive; you will be impressed.

Yes, Microsoft Web Application Proxy and F5.

My company is an IT Services Consulting company, and when requirements warrant, I plan on recommending Kemp to our other customers. Note: We currently have no financial interest in recommending Kemp.

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.

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 use Kemp LoadMaster for our SharePoint environment, worldwide.

We use Kemp to improve the security and availability of our web services, to external customers and partners, as well as a custom banquet application that is accessed over a cloud connection.

The Kemp LoadMaster gives us load balancing and reverse proxy capabilities, as well as a web application firewall to protect our web application environment and website.

We use the technology across the entire organization to solve the issue of site performance and availability for external users when booking and managing events.

Kemp and the application are hidden in the background and are always working. Kemp is great for organizations that feel they have been squeezed by traditional higher-priced load-balancer vendors (F5).

Kemp stood out from day one, with a lot of flexibility in how you can deploy and purchase the products. As a software product, they give you a seamless experience, whether you deploy it in the cloud or in your existing networking closet/data center.

Load-balancing is a great feature that is very easy to configure and it is always working fine.

If you find that something is not working you can make a feature request. A few weeks later, the feature could be implemented with a new update.

Installing updates is very easy and always works well.

The response time after a reboot is good.

The product could be improved by making the SSL Offloading easier.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about seven years.

The Kemp support team is outstanding. They were very helpful; not only did they help us to better understand the technical capabilities of Kemp, but also, they helped us resolve an issue with our VMware environment that had nothing to do with the Kemp deployment. The Kemp support actually tipped us off to the issue.

These guys are truly experts and didn't give us the run-around. They can explain everything.

I don't know what feature could be made better, as it is working really well.