F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

Previously we had an IdP on a Linux server. However, this was a pain to configure. With the F5 this has become easy. Therefore, more and more of our applications are now transferred to SAML.

I really like the ease of use of it in general. If I were to choose one in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool.

The SharePoint SSO part has some room for improvement. Opening documents and spreadsheets on local applications in on our specific situation is not possible.

None at all.

No issues with scalability.

F5 is a big company. They have a great community and TAC. The advantage with this product is that it isn't new. They have many engineers who have been working with it for a long time and have a lot of experience.

We used to have a Barracuda WAF. It was unreliable and it didn’t have all the features of the F5. It was out of maintenance and we decided never to use Barracuda again.

Easy switch from our Barracuda to F5. The setup was done with an engineer. However, if you pay good attention you can manage it afterwards. I also have a F5 test environment on a VM. These cost around $100 but are worth that money for testing purposes.

We tried FortiADC briefly. However the big contender was Citrix NetScaler.

Be sure of what you will use. F5 isn’t cheap but is worth the price. Also, take a good look at all the different options and make sure you take the correct hardware platform. You can always add more licenses, but if the physical device isn’t up to the task you’re stuck.

The primary use case is the common use case for everyone. It has performed well.

The benefit is security. It's able to track issues, the attacks. So that enables us to catch the attacks before they hit us. We are able to nail them down.

DDOS protection.

They can improve on the DDOS solution and have more stable solutions.

It's stable.

I haven't done any upgrades yet, but it is scalable to some extent.

Technical support is good. I would rate it seven out of 10.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the market value, the cost, and the stability of the product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10 because it fulfills my requirements.

Implementing load balancing services inside managed hosting services based on VMware solutions. The solution is presented as IaaS. F5 BIG-IP VE will be implemented in cooperation with the Cisco ACI solution.

F5 will improve our position in the customer service market. We plan to create packages of services from which it will be possible to build comprehensive tailor-made solutions.

Beyond the basic balancing function, other modules are important to us. In particular, a web application firewall, application security module, and a remote access module for customer applications.

As a service provider, we will target F5 BIG-IP VE solutions to customers who request infrastructure as a service. Improvements should enable customers to build a tailor-made solution in the future through a service portal.

• LTM for balancing
• ASM for WAF

I'm a system integrator, not a customer. Usually F5 meets customer expectations well. It's best of breed and an industry leader.

Security and Reporting.

As a pre-sale engineer, I'm not working with the F5 solution but I'm studying F5's features and competitor benchmarking.

When WAF is enabled, you can see a decrease in performance.

Not to date.

Very good.

Citrix NetScaler. F5 supports better features, from load balancing to security and application visibility. NetScaler is better with a VDI solution.

Not applicable.

F5 is more expensive than other solutions, so you have to be sure F5 is the best solution to fit the requirements.

Citrix, RadWare, and LBL.

You need the right skills to deploy it. Complex deployment requires TCL language knowledge.

• Great load balancing
• Solid OS
• Great support

Far superior to DNS Round-Robin load balancing; great HTTP and HTTPs redirection.

Fixing bugs.

About 11 years, I believe.

Older OS releases may have had some bugs (active/active on reboot, I think we saw on one OS version). Very stable OS over all. We had one issue on our upgrade to 11.x where I had to engage F5 support. But they resolved it.

No.

Excellent.

No.

Pretty straightforward. The first generation of Big-IP we had, we did a crossover heartbeat cable, but our current one just uses a switched network.

Great product for the money. But they can get really expensive, so get what meets your needs. They do have some expensive extras like GTM, which has both hardware and licensing costs for multiple datacenters.

Citrix, NetScaler.

Check with your IT staff and developers and agree on your needs, and buy accordingly. VM instances are now also available. They don’t have an end-to-end analytics package yet (supposedly in development), to troubleshoot users' experience to the back end nodes. (Citrix offers a product called MAS).

LTM.

We can load balance the request to servers, which was the main reason we bought the product.

I think the logging could be improved.

Two years.

No.

No.

I have never used F5 technical support.

No.

No, it was simple.

Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing.

No, straight to F5.

Stable product. It also offers a virtual edition which comes in handy if you have a VMware environment.

This product has helped us build robust solutions for what my company does.

We are fond of the load balancing feature for DNS and servers. Also, these can help you natting/hiding the real IP.

I have been working on the LTM and GTM lines. Both of the products are awesome. I would consider the Wide IP and ZoneRunner features of GTM extremely useful. 

For the overall product, I would say provisioning is a good feature. There are other modules, which are good and people might want to try, such as APM and ASM. They are used for firewall and SSL VPN.

The only area that has room for improvement would be pricing.

Other than that, the v11 clustering is a new technology they have brought in that does not require improvement. They are the leader in the space.

We did not find any stability issues while working on it. 

Bugs are part of any solution and they are fixed with every release, as with any vendor.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

We used to work with support three years back and it was not that great then. Hopefully, the situation has now improved.

Technical Support:

We did not require much technical support, as the product has good documentation. However, the experience with support as compared to other vendors was not excellent, but usable.

Regarding load balancing, this was our first product.

If you do not understand the design of this product, initial setup is tricky. If you do understand it, initial setup is straightforward.

This was implemented by an in-house team.

With the new pricing model, ROI was low, hence we switched.

This product is costly from a licensing perspective considering its competitors. This is why it lost a rating point from me.

If your IT budget can support it, go for it.

Attend a training class before trying to deploy it, or at least refer to online videos on their portal, as this will make it fairly easy for you.

It is one of the best and easiest load balancing solutions. The product was designed to allow newbies to configure it, and it is properly documented.

I think the product is a good product. I think where they can improve is in the licensing. It's quite expensive. They could make it more aligned with the business model than with the hardware.

I have been using F5 for about two years.

It is a stable product but sometimes we have some issues. I have other products that are competitors of F5, and they are also good. The performance of F5 so far is good.

Usually, because we are responsible for providing high availability, we run our architecture with redundancy. Usually, for example, when I have F5, I have a couple of F5s, the active one and the standby one. Today, I had problems. I don't know what happened; it couldn't reload automatically. The other one assumed that I have problems with my infrastructure. That's unfortunately the life of an operations guy.

It is scalable and should meet our future requirements.

Technical support is OK. Usually, you don't have direct support from the vendor. You have intermediating in the middle.

The setup is not straightforward. To set up this product, you must know how to do it. Otherwise, you can't do it. It's not plug and play.

They could buy it but there are other choices such as Cisco ACE products, as well. We have it. They are also good. F5 are good. Usually, I'm not locked into one vendor.

The reality is our bookkeeping department unfortunately has a problem with them. Because of that, I have had some issues concerning getting services from the vendor.