F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

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.

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.

More than five years.

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.

LTM is a full-reverse proxy, handling connections from clients. The F5 LTM uses Virtual Services (VSs) and Virtual IPs (VIPs) to configure a load balancing setup for a service. We have used this feature in many applications, especially for HTTP and HTTPS.

There is room for improvement with their firmware quality control. A bug in the firmware caused hardware failures.

I have been using it for one year.

Unfortunately, we faced hardware failures and a lot of other problems, as well.

With the hardware failure problem, we faced a management problem via the GUI. We could only manage the device through the CLI. The issue was caused by a firmware bug.

In addition, health check statistics like CPU and memory utilization were not correct.

It is F5’s responsibility to solve those problems, and I don’t know how they can release firmware with such bugs to their customers.

F5 support can be rated low on the scale, as there is a problem regarding handover between their engineers when we follow-up with them about some technical cases.

I recommend considering NetScaler, as well.

I've checked out the market and I think Big-IP/Viprion is the best ADC your money can buy at the moment. It has the features and innovations that demanding organizations like us desire in an ADC especially for diverse and complex application environments. F5 has a solid offering with its iRules, iControl and iApps and we use its DevCentral portal. We take advantage of the integration with both Eclipse and .NET/Visual Basic which is a nice plus.

It’s quite expensive compared to the other vendors. F5 lacks a pay-as-you-grow licensing scheme as offered by other companies, which makes acquiring their products more expensive at the outset.F5’s support for low-end platforms is also dismal, with continued restrictions imposed on such systems making it difficult for them to cater to small to medium-sized business. You might be forced to buy more expensive systems just to get the features you want and not the performance benefits of the more expensive system.I'm also concerned about F5’s continued push on new hardware platforms to generate sales.Finally, one must be able to handle the complexity and knowledge required for deploying F5’s ADC products. Selecting a reliable and experienced partner is crucial to get the right configuration for your needs and for you to be able to maximize your ADC investment.

Top of the line ADC with great features. Just make sure you have the right partner in implementing your solution so as the business value of such an expensive product is maximized.

The solution is mostly used for the LTM load balancer. Recently more of our customers are using it for the web application firewall. Some of my other customers are using the GTM model also. 

My experience in selling this solution is approximately two and a half years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution depends on the sizing of the network. Generally, the scalability is quite good.

The technical support is one of the best I have seen in their field. They have been good so far.

One of the strongest areas of this solution is its ease of install. It did not take more then a couple of hours.

The deployment can take some time because you can do a lot of configuring to meet the needs of the use cases for clients. This will take more time to configure the different areas than just the general install. We typically have two technicians on site doing the deployments.

The solution is quite expensive if we compare it with the competition. For only load balancer, it is too expensive. The license is subscription-based, except for the security model.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP a seven out of ten.

On-premises

My primary use cases of this solution are as a big IP solution, a WAF solution, EPM, and reverse proxy.

This product has improved our load balance, especially when it comes to using the termination at the A5 level, making us more efficient.

The most valuable features are the WAF and the big IP.

I've been using this solution for over eight years.

This solution is very stable.

My impression is that it's scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it took some time to complete.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

On-premises

• 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.

More than five years.

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.

In Vietnam, F5 provides better services.

When I put F5 into my network, it works better. 

The pricing could be improved.

Three to five years.

Scalability seems fine.

Technical support was helpful when we contacted them.

The pricing is inclusive of many features.

We evaluated NetScaler. F5 is the better product for our location.