F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

• 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.

When we migrate workloads into the cloud, we need the same functionality in the cloud, and low balancing is part of that. Being able to manage the platform on cloud, the same as on-premise, is the use case.

Load balancing generally brings high availability and a bigger ability to scale out. In some cases, it brings security, depending on how it is configured.

• Flexibility
• Capacity
• Reputation in the market.

I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome.

It is very stable. It's a pretty solid product.

Our clients use it pretty heavily. Most all of them are production workloads and some of them are external facing workloads, so you can see seasonal peaks.

It's very scalable. Probably the largest implementation I did was with hundreds of servers behind it.

The technical support is very good.

We haven't had any issues with the integration and configuration of AWS. It works just like it would on-premise. I have some questions around its scale in the cloud. We haven't done as much work in the cloud as we've done with on-premise. However, so far we haven't had any problems with it either.

My clients have seen ROI.

It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay.

There is always the Cisco on-premise solution in play. There are also the AWS native functionalities.

The ease of management is the tie-breaker for F5, being able to manage the on-premise and cloud with the same tools.

It's fairly easy to integrate. If you compare it to Cisco products, Cisco is very regimented and works best with themselves. F5 has been forced to play nice with others, which is a bonus.

The three key things to look at closely:

1. Look at the flexibility of the products.
2. The ability to work with it on-premise and in the cloud is a huge advantage.
3. The ability to integrate it with other non-F5 products.
   

We use both the AWS and on-premise versions. They work about the same, which is what I like about the product: same management plane and configuration.

It integrates with the networking layer, which is fairly complicated. Depending on the customer, there are different products that it integrates with. More often than not, it's load balancing in front of Windows in Unix. In some cases, integrating with other tools like the LP or other network products.

We use it for low balancing.

It has been in our environment for four to five years, but I have only been using it for a little over a year.

• The detail that you have available when setting up iRules. 
• How the traffic routing works in F5.

The management process seems a bit difficult. 

The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface.

For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs. However, this is more an implementation detail than an F5 detail.

It is very stable. I have no concerns regarding stability for F5.

We are seasonal, so we go from low to high volumes. F5 has never been a concern of ours for stability.

We run an Active-Active version of two instances, so scalability between the on-premise and AWS versions hasn't been a huge issue for us. Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot.

We have support agreements in place, but they are managed by the infrastructure team. I do not contact the technical support, they do.

The integration and configuration into the AWS environment was pretty good.

The product was already in place when I came onboard.

My preference is to use AWS natively, but there are some issues around session management and so on, which have prevented us from using it. While a lot of these issues have been solved, a lot of our applications are tied to the F5 infrastructure.

Always use the Automatic Synching between F5. Don't try to use the API to do the synching. This is where we went wrong. We were trying to push the nodes to F5 individually instead of letting F5 handle the synchronization process, and it doesn't work.

We were previously using the on-premise version, but now we are using the AWS version. They are about the same as far as functionality.

F5 delivers a full range of solutions that simplify service providers’ security architectures while mitigating threats. The full proxy architecture of F5 solutions also allows service providers to attain extensive visibility and control throughout layers 4 through 7. This enables granular control of all connections, more extensive security functionality, and comprehensive end-to-end protection against DDoS and other attacks. F5 solutions protect targeted network elements, the DNS infrastructure, devices, and applications with features that include application health monitoring, a robust web application firewall, web access controls, TCP optimization, web acceleration, L7 DDoS protection, and broad SSL support, including SSL inspection and offload.

I installed F5 on the DMZ zone of the firewall. The traffic will come to the virtual server of the F5. F5 will decrypt the traffic and offload the traffic to the firewall as clear.
This way, we can mitigate many attacks from the F5 and from the firewall.

Protection of published website. When using ASM, we can have a layer 7 protection in order to prevent the website from attacks.

F5 should improve or develop the reporting tools further.
They should improve the management policies on the BOX.

It's a stable product.

They have one box and you can implement many features with it like LTM, ASM, GTM. So it is scalable. And they have a virtual edition and an appliance edition.

Technical support is a seven out of 10. They provide quick solutions and they reply to us very fast.

Straightforward.

It's fair, it's not too expensive. Maybe just a little high.

It's a good product to use. It has many features so can use it to secure your environment. I'm satisfied with the product.

We’re a systems integration company. We propose this solution mostly to our banking customers and large enterprise clients, so that they can load-balance their core banking applications and their main applications.

It also provides proxying, the client cannot directly access the server. BIG-IP is a proxy between the user and the server, so the client cannot make connections directly to servers. They land on F5 BIG-IP and then F5 creates connections on servers on behalf of clients.

We use the solution for smarter, safer, and reliable connectivity.

It has multi-tenancy features, like hardware clustering. It has software partitioning so that you can partition F5. For example, in my recent deployments, I deployed F5 in a bank where they had two load balancers. One was Cisco Ace and the other was Citrix Netscaler.

We created two instances, two vCMP Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing, two hardware partitions in F5, one for Ace and one for Citrix. We migrated all applications which were on Ace to the Ace partition, and we migrated all applications which were on Citrix to the Citrix partition. Further, we created the outgoing internet and software partitions, and it has application visibility, reporting functions.

It has so many features. First of all, it has a full proxy architecture, it has multiple modules. The best feature is the WAF, the web application firewall module. It also has cashing type capabilities. It has all kinds of load-balancing algorithms based on your IT requirements.

So the WAF and load balancing. Both are core features of BIG-IP.

In every environment, you have a Web application firewall, you have internet firewalls. Then, traffic comes into your datacenter so that you have datacenter firewalls. F5 has everything.

It provides first-tier firewalling, for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, it provides optimization, and it provides a proxy feature, where your users cannot directly access your server. It acts as a fully proxy architecture. It has client-side and server-side connections, both, and they're separate.

It also has an AVR feature: application, visibility, and recording. It's good for customers looking for what is actually happening in their network and where the latency is. If I'm using iDirect, the bank branch is connecting to my core banking application, but if the clients are finding that the application is slow, it has TCP  LAN and WAN optimization features. It has has caching.

The room for improvement is that the product is a little costly. I live in the Third World, Pakistan. We have budget constraints, even in big enterprise servers. My team said that this product is too costly, and why don't we go with another product, we should do a comparative analysis with Citrix and F5.

I told them that is costly, but it has rich features, the support is good, the features are reliable, and the technical assistance center, the tech support, is almost perfect.

Still, I would say they need to cut their prices for countries or regions that we live in.

The one gap I saw was that pure LBN integration is a little tricky. The insertion of F5 in LBN is a little tricky. They need to work on something, on products by which they can insert F5 in any sort of cloud environment. These are not really big things. 

They are continuously improving. They are improving day by day, and they are the number-one load balancer.

It is a stable product. It runs on TMOS, traffic management operating system. This is very stable. 

If they see that an upgrade required, they provide you the release and they provide you the release notes, so you can upgrade your TMOS version and at any time. You can also open a case and they can guide you on how to upgrade your TMOS version.

They also keep an eye on vulnerability. If there is a bug or any sort of vulnerability in their operating system, they will immediately release an update. So the product is so much more stable compared to any load balancers on the planet at the moment.

It has that scalability for adding more F5, N + 1. 

It's scalable, and it has more functions than a service. At the same time, this device can run access policy manager, it has Web application firewall, datacenter switching to DR sites. It has a modular approach actually. It gives you what you want.

They are very professional. They are highly skilled people.

It is neither simple nor complex. It all depends on what kind of situations you are in. My last deployment was a little bit complex but previous deployments were very simple.

We did hardware partitioning and software partitioning for a multi-tenancy concept, where every application owner has its own load balancing instance within F5. So it all depends on how you deploy a device and it depends on your planning.

If you want a simple deployment you can do so. You can create multiple virtual servers on F5 BIG-IP technology, and within multiple virtual servers you can have multiple nodes, where a node equals two application servers.

It can be deployed in a complex manner and it can be deployed in a very simple manner, it all depends on your choice. 

It has a rapid deployment feature to deploy Microsoft Exchange load balancing. It has automation. You can simply click on Microsoft Exchange 2016 Email Server. Tclick on it and tell F5 about server IPs, and it goes automatically. 

 24 x 7 always on applications without any down time. 

Brocade ADX.

F5 is the number-one application delivery controller, plus they are the number-one Web application firewall, together in the market right now. So what else do you want from them? Whenever we go and pitch this solution to our customers, we tell them that we are not selling you just a load balancer. We are selling you application delivery controllers, and Web application firewalls.

I give it 9.5 out of 10. It's a really costly product and smaller organizations cannot afford this solution, so it's hard to sell a plan. But once the customer has it, this product is a 10.

We use F5 for the load balancing of our equipment. We use it for DDoS functionalities in our security solution. 

This solution is the best security platform. We have even attached it to another security platform solution for DDoS.

They need to improve the interface and some of the functionalities.

It is very stable. We have not had many problems.

We don't need additional features to grow out the platform.

The occasion in which we needed technical support, we didn't have problems with them, because they always answered our questions without any trouble.