F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

Our company is based in different geographical locations and we need to create SD-WANs with tight security while allowing remote access to our resources. To manage that and to manage the whole network, we use BIG-IP.

When we purchased the product, we found it to be a bit expensive.

If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it.

If the price for a cloud-based deployment can be matched with their competitors the I think it would be a far better solution. 

I have been using F5 BIG-IP for almost two years.

BIG-IP is stable and we plan to continue using it. We don't want to change because we're happy with what it's doing unless we switch over to the cloud. I think that cloud sizing is too heavy.

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.

I think that technical support is pretty good. On a scale of one to ten, I can reasonably score them a nine.

The implementation and deployment happened before I joined the company, although I have reviewed the procedure and did not find anything challenging when it came to installation. Once you understand how to work with the product, it is easy to manage the services.

Our in-house team takes care of the maintenance. There are three people who manage it, and once every three months, we spend 30 or 40 minutes reading and clearing up the logs.

I don't think that this product really provides value for the money. However, what you get for the cost is satisfactory. It's not like I won the lottery. This is a solution that does what it's supposed to do at the price point.

When we purchased additional licenses for our other locations, we received a discount of between 20% and 25%. My understanding is that they matched the competitor's price.

If we move all of our on-premises systems onto the cloud, we will probably look for another solution. We may rely on the cloud provider for this. 

We have not felt the need to upgrade to the most recent version or do any updates on this product because we're pretty happy with what we have.

Overall, this is a good product and if one can afford it, then I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. 

We use the whole pallet of the Big-IP products starting with the Application Security Management, the web application firewall for the F5. We use it for the protection of files at sites and we also use the load balancer. I also have experience with the airlock and we're now researching the possibility of exchanging our Big-IP system with something else. We're hoping to find a solution that's better for the cloud but which can be a hybrid. We have a partnership with several vendors and I work as an IT security engineer.

I've found Traffic Learning to be the most valuable feature in this solution. 

This solution could be improved by reducing the cost. It's the main reason that we're considering another option for our website even though we're very satisfied with the way the Big-IP works and the way Big-IP protects our environment, but it's very expensive. We are keen to find out if there is a similar system for technology that would suit us and cost less. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

This is a very stable solution. I've been using their products for years and have never had any issues. 

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

Technical support respond quickly and they are helpful. Their communities are very involved. I would say I'm super satisfied.

Sometimes implementation is simple and sometimes it's complex, it really depends on the situation. If you've done it before, deployment can be accomplished in half an hour, but if it's from scratch it can take anywhere up to two days. For anyone with experience in deploying this kind of equipment, it's usual that something always happens and problems arise. It usually takes one or two engineers to carry out the deployment. 

I don't have much advice other than to suggest that people look for high quality solutions to implement. It's really about what the client wants and if they're prepared to take the risk of a less expensive solution they need to realize that it might also mean a product that is less good quality. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case is for ADC (Application Delivery Controller) and SSL VPN prospectively worked for the PoC.

This solution is very good and the product stability is excellent.

It has very good production for SMB protocol.

I found the most valuable feature to be the SSL VPN.

The license terms for "non-commercial" are challenging for us. 

We use F5 BIG-IP with LTM burst, SM burst, and ETM burst. We use it in our cloud service and all our service centers. We even offer F5 BIG-IP to our partners.

As a firm, we use F5 BIG-IP to provide load balancing over many to increase one of the hardware appliances that carries loads over the throughput they are providing. 

Ultimately, the service has not affected our customers. However, there was a failure in one of the nodes that became infected.

F5 BIG-IP did not sense that the virus was there. The security didn't function.

F5 BIG-IP is used with good applications and functions as an application firewall with additional features.

I've been building F5 BIG-IP. We will not use any feature or any service unless there is a business case and there is a need for business implementation. 

The products are great and easy to upgrade from time to time to improve functionality. F5 BIG-IP is working fine. We use it more in production and operations.

There are issues with F5 BIG-IP but they are minor issues, not big ones. This does not affect production and services.

Sometimes the operations and the facility systems fail. However, there is an alert action from the windows. 

Related to the groups, when it comes to cost, rates are regulated. When the market is not good, then we will consider doing the increase. 

In general, there are more features that could be provided with F5 BIG-IP if it were not so costly.

From application to application to customer respects, you can't always customize software based on customer requirements. If you don't consider that, you can't deliver.

F5 BIG-IP is very stable.

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.

We're beginning to align well with F5 BIG-IP. I've been in contact with customer service.

I have notifications from the alert window and all of the issues would be resolved.

The initial setup is not straightforward. You can consider F5 BIG-IP as a standard. It is not complex. In the end, the product itself is serving the business and services.

For deployment, we used one engineer only. The main point to consider is the client's position. We have to respect the client's business requirements.

5 BIG-IP is too expensive at the current licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options but chose 5 BIG-IP on basis of merit.

We use F5 BIG-IP a lot in production right now. The product is indispensable to us.

I would rate the product an overall nine out of ten. Most of the benefits of F5 BIG-IP are cyclical because of the licensing costs.

F5 has performed marvelously. It certainly holds in value and holds its name.

We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance.

I would like to see improvement in the manageability and easier setup. 

They need to have features that you can turn on and spin up and not have to buy a license for. I'd want to be able to quickly spin up a feature and start using it and then come back and pay for it later. Citrix has them beat on that. 

F5s are rock solid. I've seen them deploy in major data centers and they're rock solid.

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.

F5 technical support is good. They have a lot of good people there. Once you get into the area of expertise that you need help with, those people are very good at helping with the problem. Every time I call in, I go right to tech support and they're really good help. 

The initial setup can be complex but it's not because of the F5 itself. It's because of your own network. You can get in your own way. What makes it complex is the fact that you have to stand back and figure out the configuration. F5 is there to help you with that and give you some idea on where to place it and what to do. Some of that also falls underneath the realm of managed services or just services in general. They start you with a brand new spiffy product, but you're left with the migration process. 

They are expensive. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. Not a ten because of the usability and a manageability. I've had to send somebody to F5 University to get trained, whereas with the Citrix NetScaler I don't necessarily have to send them out to training. I was able to pick up NetScaler right away. Whereas, F5, if you have it, you should probably get trained on it because it's a little more esoteric. 

Everybody wants the best of a name brand. If F5 was like a Tesla, would you want to buy a Tesla or a Toyota? They're both big name brands, but when you hear Tesla, you know exactly what that is; it's the futuristic top-of-the-line electric car. If you can afford a Tesla, then buy the Tesla but if you can't afford a Tesla, and you want something that's going to get you from point A to point B at a halfway decent price, go with Citrix.

We are primarily using it for load balancing, and with BIG-IQ managing Layer 7 security policies.

We did get good flexibility as well as the capabilities to accept declarative API and create per app dashboard and create a better view on the telemetry dashboard.

• Cloud templates 
• Declarative onboarding
• API service gateway
• Policy-based security management.

Services to be improved: 

• Multi-cloud consistency, like to simplify administration with centralized policies with multi-cloud vendors
• F5 lateral scalability within the container is still restricted.
• Web application firewalls and service mesh would be a nice-to-have feature.
• Drive programmable application with 100% restful API
• Cover deployment
• Monitoring
• Policy-based control. 

We use it to deliver services on the cloud.

It improves the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining applications and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks.

• Application security
• Automation
• Orchestration
• It is a fast and available solution. 

They have to scale, developing more products.

I would like them to have more flexible models.

It is the perfect solution when you have high workloads in your IT environment.

They have the potential to scale in better way.

I have integrated F5 rules for AWS with web exploits and OWASP Rules, and it is so easy to deploy.

There are three relevant things about purchasing through the AWS Marketplace:

1. It Increase protection against web attacks.
2. It integrates with AWS WAF, which makes it easy to deploy without changes to your infrastructure.
3. F5 manages your AWS WAF rules, so you don't have to.

We purchased through the AWS Marketplace because it was a popular way to go, and we were intrigued. The price of this product is not an issue. They have good pricing and licensing.

It helps you to manage workloads in a better way on your cloud environment.

I also have integrated it on my private cloud.

This is for remote access to an internal network of the organization to do all types of work. The requirement for VPN is secure with high performance.

Two issues found in using BIG-IP VPN compared with Cisco VPN:

1. Performance: Two applications are being used: remote desktop (RDP or rdesktop) and VNC viewer. Comparisons are done on the same client machines (Windows 10 and Linux 16.04) over the same network. When using Cisco VPN, applications are working smoothly while occasionally jittery. When using F5 VPN, applications are quite jittery. Sometimes applications are useless (too slow to refresh the screen).
2. Client support: Cisco VPN has more Clients supported than BIG-IP, e.g., BSD.

Still not clear why our IT decided to switch to F5 BIG-IP after two years experience. It appears as if there may be some advantage (possibly) related to security concerns (more secure?).

Performance is the first thing and most critical issue that needs improvement.

Supporting more Clients would be nice, but without improving performance, F5 will not widely be used for critical work. It killed an international meeting the first time that we used BIG-IP VPN.

Performance: Using the product, applications are jittery.

No issues.

We used Cisco VPN. I am not sure why our IT forced us to switch to F5 without our feedback.

Initial setup is easy and pretty standard. Setup is not much different from all other VPNs.

In-house.

Unless the price difference is large, this is not the primary concern for the product. The performance and product-related issues (secure for VPN, multi-function for network device, etc.) are the keys.

No.