F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We are using it primarily for load balancing. We also make great use of SSL interception (offloading and onloading), packet inspection, rewriting, and DNS wide IP.

It is a very good, flexible solution. It helps us to catch up on flaws in our partner solutions on top of its load balancing feature.

Along with load balancing, we perform a lot of packet inspections, URL rewriting, and SSL interceptions via iRule. 

I would recommend that the cost be lowered.

User tracking: Needs to provide a visual interface to follow a customer's activity (from client to BIG-IP to SNAT IP to the chosen server, then back). Today, we are still performing packet captures.

Not so far.

Not so far.

So far, we have not had to contact them.

We previously used Cisco ACE, which has very limited features.

The initial setup is straightforward. The GUI interface is user-friendly.

Software upgrades have been performed by F5 teams.

The initial migration was done by our technical team. 

The last implementation was done by the F5 team. I would rate them as a nine out of 10. I am not giving a 10 because we encountered some difficulties with the software upgrade from version 11 to version 12.

ROI is four years.

If you are planning to use security features, better to go for strong hardware and the best bundle license, which is great for web security.

No.

We use it for local traffic management and for the application firewall. We are trying to deploy virtual appliances in AWS. 

It has improved our program performance and security.

• The web application firewall.
• The configuration and integration into the AWS environment was pretty easy.
  

We would like to see load balancing between the cloud and the on-premise, a straightforward deployment feature.

The stability is almost there. Sometimes it hangs or there are unpredictable performance issues.

It's easier to scale.

Technical support could be better.

The price is high.

We looked at A10. When deciding whether to go with F5 or A10 it depends on the business requirements. Sometimes I propose one and sometimes I propose the other. It depends on the customer's requirements and budget. For our internal use we went with F5 because it's the best tool.

The on-prem version and the AWS versions are almost the same.

In terms of the experience purchasing through AWS marketplace, because we are a partner, the way we purchase it from AWS is different. We don't buy directly from the market.

Overall, it's a good product.

We use it for brokering services.

It has made it a single entry point for all users, verging across all the VPCs. It is more of an SSO solution versus multitier user loggin.

• Central point of entry for our user base.
• User authentication
• PPI
• Integration with our website.

We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them. On the back-end, we have a SafeNet component. They are going to bring additional features in, so allowing integration with encryption and PKI, and tying it back into Microsoft AD in the back with an LDAP lookup for users.

The stability seems fine. We provide fault tolerance with HA, so we have two of them up and running. We have built in integration. Therefore, we do not worry about workload issues

It seems very scalable now. We have 200 users, going to about 10,000 within the next year. There are multiple VPCs and multiple AWS accounts.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment seems to be pretty straightforward. There doesn't seem to be anything complex. We haven't needed anything additional, like Professional Services.

We did use technical support on the original engineering.

We have seen ROI because we are not hosting it. We moved this to the cloud for our ingest, so our workload is moving to the cloud and Amazon.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there.

We have found the pricing and licensing on AWS to be competitive.

We looked at F5, Citrix, and VMware. We chose F5 because it has a better market name, seemed to be vendor-agnostic for providing capabilities that others didn't, and its reputation.

Use F5. It has a good reputation. We experienced easy implementation and had an overall good experience.

We use it only on AWS.

We use it as a load balancer.

We have always used it and never had any issues with it.

The most valuable feature is being able to manipulate the iRules, so you can send traffic to different avenues.

The auto logout feature after three minutes is terrible. I wish they would make that longer, since it is not a feature that we can change.

It contributes to our traffic by about fifty percent. That's why we love it. We have never had any issues.

We put a lot of stress on our F5 on-premise. We have support, which is great. It is a ten out of ten.

We have over 12 applications that we use it for with about 300 servers which are connected up using this load balancer. 

We're a big company. We do like the on-premise version. However, we are looking into AWS servers to help us scale for larger avenues as well.

We reached out to the technical support a few times, and they are great. They are a ten out of ten.

The integration and configuration are great. When I need to make changes, I have been fine.

We are currently using the Terraform Infrastructure as Code. Therefore, we are using the F5 provider to create new nodes, pools, and purchase servers, and the integration has been seamless for us.

We are going to the AWS Marketplace because purchasing there is simple to do. We are looking for the ease it provides. We have tried other providers, but it wasn't as good.

We did not evaluate anything else.

Take advantage of it and use it.

We use the on-premise version of this product. We are looking into moving over to the AWS version.

We are using it for load balancing and security.

When someone requests data through the load balancer, we pull the certificate name out to identify who that person is. This is one of the things that F5 does. We haven't able to replicate this so far with the Amazon products. That is why we are going to F5.

It has the ability to do the security work that we need along with the current thing which is supporting the load balancer. Therefore, it can determine if the system is going down, then route the traffic somewhere else.

It does what we need.

We had a problem where customers were doing transactions in our system, pulling health records, and the system had to be shut down for maintenance. Unfortunately, we wouldn't know that the system was being shut down, and we would lose that information. Then, the customer would get upset.

Using the F5, we were able to build rules to detect that the shutdown was occurring, then begin to route people elsewhere, so we didn't have any outages or downtime. This made customers a lot happier, and it made us a lot happier.

They could improve the product's ease of use. There has been a bit of complication on some things from the admin side. There is some confusion how to operate it.

I don't think too much stress placed on it. In F5 Studio, the stability been very good.

We run 14 servers. We get up to about half a million transactions an hour, and the scalability has been good. It has not been a problem.

I would rate the technical support as a five out of ten. Our admin had to learn everything and do it himself. He seems to have had difficultly at times with the tech support. However, this may be a manifestation of the fact the government bought it, but didn't buy the support.

The integration and configuration of this product were pretty good. Once you get going, it gets easier to use.

It works with Red Hat JBoss application server, and it integrates reasonably well.

It is sort of a commodity product. A load balancer is a load balancer. What will be, at the end of the day, the cheapest option or have the best performance, that is what it will come down to. Can it do the necessary performance that we need, and if so, is there a cheaper alternative? If not, then we'll stick with what we have.

We also evaluated some free stuff on the AWS Marketplace, or some cheaper stuff. We also looked at the Amazon offerings, like the Elastic Load Balancing.

The customer wanted to take what they had on-premise and put it in Amazon: full stop. Because we could obtain the certifications for security and the existing Amazon products didn't do 100 percent of what F5 did, they didn't want us to change any code. They just wanted us to keep going the way we were. This is the reason why we pulled F5 over.

Try doing a proof of concept or a prototype, before you go full in on a load balancer, to make sure it does everything you need.

We have both the AWS and on-premise versions. We used the on-premise version to compare it to what Amazon had to offer. 

• Load balancing
• Certificate management
• Pooling of services

• Load balancing deployments
• Active pools and standby pools for high availability.

• Load balancing
• Being able to adjust headers. 
• Request response headers. 
• Patching issues in the load balancer that we don't want in the application layer.

Certificate management needs improvement. I would like automated deployment of new certificates without manual intervention to be in the next release of this product.

The product is very stable. We put a decent amount of stress on it given our load.

It seems to be a very scalable product. 

As for the size of our environment, we have our own data center, but it's a small data center.

I would give it a nine out of ten for its stability and feature set, as well as the way it handles our load.

Definitely consider this product on your product evaluation list.

It is the front-end to the cloud for all the services in our data center. So, it sort of integrates with all of our services.

We have yet to integrate it with AWS.

We use it for load balancing and routing.

It supports APIs and virtual additions for cloud and VMware.

It integrates with various firewall and networking devices along with application services, and it works fine.

• Routing
• Load balancing

• Cloud native integration should be provided.
• Native support for containers should be added to future releases, as this is the future of load balancing.

The stability is great. We put our production load on it, which is very stressful.

Scalability has been great. We have thousands of severs. F5 has scaled very well.

They provide average enterprise technical support.

I also evaluated Cisco, but chose F5 because it had better features in terms of load balancing. I liked the various features in F5, including input/output routing, load balancing, and global load balancing.

Explore the API support and integration with the open source products. Those are the key thing to analyze. F5 are the experts in their area.

I use the on-premise version.

We use it for a number of solutions that we build, mostly for identity and access management control.

It is the centerpiece of a lot of the solutions that we build, and it has integrated with everything that we have needed it to.

It is the best value for our engineers and architects who know how to use it. It meets the government's requirements every time that we've used it. It is easy for us to keep integrating with our solutions.

We have found the consistency of the application always being the way it is supposed to be as its most valuable feature.

We put a lot of stress on the application. It is very stable.

The scalability is awesome. Our environment is thousands upon thousands of instances in AWS.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was very simple. The main reason that we went this way was the simplicity of buying it there. It is maintained and upgraded for us, and this makes it easy to stay current.

While the licensing is good through the AWS Marketplace, it is more expensive than what you could buy yourself. However, the convenience outweighs the price.