F5 BIG-IP DNS Reviews

I mainly use BIG-IP DNS to create business recovery scenarios.

BIG-IP DNS's best features are DNS monitoring and global service load balancing.

The initial setup could be easier.

I've been using BIG-IP DNS for four and a half years.

BIG-IP DNS is stable.

BIG-IP DNS is scalable.

I'm not happy with F5's technical support.

Neutral

The initial setup was complex.

The on-prem version is only available on a yearly license, but the cloud version can be paid for on a day-by-day basis.

BIG-IP DNS is easy to deploy as you can just log in to F5 and request free trial licenses, and the Virtual Edition can be deployed on public and on-prem cloud. I would rate BIG-IP DNS nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and F5 DNS Delivery is one of the products that we implement for our customers. This product is normally deployed for high application availability. That means we use the local traffic manager module the most. The DNS module is used for global server load-balancing and fail-over across data centers.

The messaging between NGINX and F5 should be simplified. When I do presentations to customers, they sometimes are confused about this issue. It is not clear where NGINX gets into the network.

I would like to see deeper integration with VMware in the sense that F5 compliments VMware, in the context of application availability. VMware has the Site Recovery Manager that looks at the virtual machine side of things. If there's deep integration with VMware, where F5 is able to figure out that an application is impaired and it wants to failover, it should be able to tell VMware to trigger that process.

Better pricing for this product would make it more competitive on the market.

We have been using F5 DNS Delivery for three years.

This product is highly scalable, especially given the fact that you are not confined to one particular port speed. You can upgrade as your traffic grows using different transceivers.

We have customers in several countries. In Botswana, we have between 27 and 35 clients. In Zimbabwe, we have close to 60, and in Zambia, there are fewer than 15.

F5 technical support is quite good and they follow up if there are any issues. F5 support is available even before the deployment, right from the pre-sales stage to the deployment itself, as well as after-sales support.

I have also worked with Kemp load balancers and they don't even come close to F5.

The initial setup is straightforward. Once I have all of the information required in order to deploy, it takes one day to complete.

For my customers, I am deploying the current version, which is 16. For others, we haven't upgraded them. I'm simply patching the areas necessarily as identified by F5. 

We are the system integrator and handle the deployment for our customers.

This product is quite pricey but if you compare the feature set and its compatibility with similar products on the market, you would understand why it's that price. Licensing is either perpetual or subscription-based, depending on the modules that you want.

We're doing a campaign now to question our customers about business resilience using the F5 product. Most customers have invested in business continuity but sometimes they find that what they have done doesn't conform to their own business continuity plans. We go into this type of environment and introduce F5 to ensure that their continuity plans are on point.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it. That said, no product is perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.