F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We usually use the product for load balancing, as a web server, and for web traffic.

We're hosting a website for our company, and the solution has helped a lot with load balancing. 

The load-balancing features are great. You can do several different types, depending on the application. 

The solution offers good automation. 

It's stable and reliable. 

The solution can scale.

The setup is pretty easy.

They offer good technical support.

The GUI needs improvement. They need some sort of help section in the GUI, like descriptions of certain features. There are a lot of features, and it is hard to remember what does what. Having some sort of prompt or pop-up in the GUI would help a lot. 

I've been using the solution for around six years. 

The stability and reliability are great. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. It's easy to expand. 

We have two or three users directly dealing with the solution. 

Technical support has been helpful and responsive so far. 

While I was involved in the on-premises deployment. For the cloud, I didn't have to do much. It's a pretty straightforward setup. The only complex part is building the HA since it's linked to following a certain procedure. In that case, the ease of implementation depends on the experience of the one who's going to deploy it.

Two people should be able to handle deployment. 

We have witnessed a return on investment. 

I'd rate the pricing three out of ten. It is quite expensive to scale up. 

The product can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

If a customer really wants a robust and stable load-balancing appliance, they should go for LTM.

I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

BIG-IP LTM is mainly used to load balance applications.

BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration. It's also very flexible because you can use iRules to manipulate the traffic.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for over ten years.

BIG-IP LTM is quite stable - sometimes there are security vulnerabilities, but they inform us when a patch is needed. 

BIG-IP LTM is scalable - once F5 is installed, you can keep adding servers behind it.

BIG-IP LTM's technical support is good - once you log a case with them, the support is quite prompt and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex - it's quite flexible in terms of configuration, but the person configuring it needs to understand the application side, the network side, and the server. The speed of deployment depends on the application requirement and the application deployment cycle.

BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product, so it's quite expensive and isn't affordable for all customers. F5's licensing is based on modules, so there are separate charges depending on which features you want.

Before implementing BIG-IP LTM, you should understand your expectations and requirements, especially from the application team. Putting BIG-IP LTM into a not-so-critical environment would be very expensive, so you may want to consider more medium-range solutions that can do the same job. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of ten out of ten.

We use it for server management and application traffic, that is, to load balance between traffic for applications coming from their service. Users coming in are then able to have their traffic go to the service that has the suitable resources or adequate resources.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition.

It also provides lower latency.

It would be good to have better traffic and better data. It would be nice to have more granularity to see packets in terms of the header details, the analytics, etc. It would be nice if that was also part of it and to have analytics added to the traffic.

I've been using it for two years.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is pretty stable. It's one of the most stable products that I know, when it comes to load balancing and traffic.

It is very scalable. We have thousands of users.

The technical support is top notch.

It is pretty easy to set up.

Because there were other parties involved, the deployment took us about a week. Normally, it takes a couple of hours.

We did it in-house.

I would advise you to go for it because it's one of the top three solutions in my opinion. I would rate it at seven on a scale from one to ten.

Currently, we use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager as our traffic management solution. As a consultant, it is project-based with my clients rather than hands-on. Our clients use the solution to load balance their current application server in the DMZ and also in the data center.

The most valuable feature of the F5 BIG-IP LTM solution is load balancing.

To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes.

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

F5 BIG-IP is a stable solution. It is quite mature and does not have many concerns.

Scalability is good. We use it for active and passive, and we also do some TCMP.

I would rate technical support a four out of five. Their support is quite good, however, they could be a bit more responsive and react faster to requests.

Positive

The biggest concern for my clients is the pricing.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP, we compared the product with other vendors. We chose F5 BIG because of its technical support as well as its documentation. Their knowledge base is easy to read and access to information is available on their website. It is a complete product for an ADC solution. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten and recommend this solution to users that are looking to use it.

We use it to publicly deliver applications.

The capability is at a seven or eight out of ten.

In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5.

We need a very large team to manage the solution. Had it been cloud native, it would have been very seamless, but because it's not cloud native, it does not integrate really well.

We've been using it for a few years.

It's a cloud solution.

From a scalability point of view, this solution is not really up to the mark. The on-demand requirements or on-demand scalability options are not good.

We have close to 5,000 applications hosted on F5 that are delivered.

The technical support is very poor. They do not deliver on their SLAs, and even when we escalate the issue, we do not get a good response in 24 hours.

The initial setup is straightforward. For a very basic, standard F5 setup, the best practices based deployment will work fine. However, for very large scale deployment models, the recommendations that come in from F5 may not really meet your requirements.

For a typical setup, you would like to mimic how it's been set up on-premises, but this is not the way you would set it up on the cloud. You will end up hitting limitations on the cloud, and you would have to rearchitect your overall design or configurations when you deploy it. As a result, the setup for the hybrid model is not straightforward.

We strongly recommend not to go with F5 when internal teams or verticals want to mimic the same architecture.

In terms of the capability, I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at seven or eight, on a scale from one to ten, and in terms of scalability at four or five. Overall, I would rate it at six.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for the web application firewall and a load balancing system. We are using it in a government project.

There are not very many areas for improvement, but the price is high.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately four months.

I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to be stable.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a scalable solution.

We have approximately nine people using this solution in my organization.

We have only opened up two support tickets with the support and on both occasions, they provided a good service.

The initial setup of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was complex and could be made easier. The full process took approximately three weeks.

We used consultants for the implementation of the solution. 

We have 10 to 12 managers supporting this solution.

The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) a seven out of ten.

I am using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for load balancing. For example, I create the virtual server, and in there we have a pool and member server. This is used for simple load balancing.

We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing.

When I was using the solution I was using the basic functions and I found it difficult to handle some of the more advanced features. I needed assistance from my IT department or the vendors themself. There should be more workshops are places to gain knowledge on how to use the solution. You need specific skill sets to use it.

I have used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager(LTM) within the past 12 months.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a stable and reliable solution.

Our whole IT department is using the solution with some application teams. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in the IT department.

When there is an issue it is first looked at by our internal team rather a ticket being opened directly with the vendor. I open the tickets to our internal team and if they cannot solve the issue, they will escalate to the vendor. The technical support from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is good.

We did not do the implementation ourselves.

It is important to know how the solution works. For example, how to set up the interface, routing, pools, and the implementation steps. After the basic configurations, you will understand you may need or want to try to learn more of the features, such as the layers of the SNI. It is ideal to start with the very basic implementation first. We have been doing the day-to-day operation.

When it comes to troubleshooting, it is important to know how to isolate the problem, analyze it, and be fast to solve them when it appears.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a six out of ten.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for our applications. We have six applications and 16 servers currently. We make all our applications and utilize this tool. Some applications are published on LSM.

The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved.

I've used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for one year, within the last year.

We find this tool stable. We are sensitive to changes, and for us, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is scalable.

We had a good setup experience with this tool, but we had to raise a ticket with support for assistance.

We implemented F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager ourselves. We didn't use a consultant or integrator for implementation, but we contacted their support team.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a high-priced tool. We pay for its license yearly.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager has good performance.

Your success with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager will depend on how much you understand how the application is working.

Deployment of this tool took two hours.

We have 600 users of this tool, and currently, there's no requirement for increasing its usage.

We have one manager and two technical staff who takes care of the deployment and maintenance of this tool. They're building applications, and they're using this tool.

I'm recommending F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to others who want to start using it.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I'm rating F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an eight.

We often use the Citrix ADC and F5 BIG-IP LTM together, because they have similar features. But, normally, we use Citrix solutions because we are Citrix providers in Bangkok, so we're not usually working with F5. However, there are some projects where we deploy F5 alongside Citrix or substitute it for the Citrix solution. 

F5 could improve the rule-setting capabilities in the GUI, and they need to simplify web management. For example, the menus in the Citrix GUI are easier to navigate, with a clean structure and layout. It helps you navigate and find what you're looking for, but some of the menus in the F5 GUI are not very intuitive. You're doing the same task, but sometimes it's on the left, sometimes on the right, etc. It should all be on the same setup group menu or something like that. 

I've been working with BIG-IP LTM for almost 10 years. 

I think F5's tech support may be better than Citrix's because they mainly focus on the ADC product, but Citrix support covers Hypervisor, XenMobile, FAS, and ADC. And from my experience, sometimes, we face some issues that Citrix cannot handle. In our first year, Citrix support was not very good, but in the second year, it was okay.

Each product can be simple or complex to set up in its own way, but Citrix setup is more straightforward overall. Citrix doesn't have any restriction on modules or on features, so the features are exactly the same whether it's a small or large deployment. Only the performance is different, but everything else is the same.

I can't say much about the price because our sales department handles pricing. I'm a technical engineer, but I can say that all of these products are in the same price range.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM nine out of 10. You can't go wrong with F5 because F5 and Citrix ADC are like the most advanced BMW in the market. So if what you need is deployment, localizing, high availability, and web balancing for your web server application server, both products can give you the same results. Both are good.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) as a load balancing solution. We use many of the features associated with the solution, such as the Local Traffic Manager and Access Analytics that are associated with the SSL.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very easy to use, from SSL Management to enabling, disabling loads, applications, systems, and monitoring. Overall the solution keeps our application functional from a client's perspective 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have rules that are set up to detect if any part of the application in one of the nodes is not functioning correctly, having a problem, or is experiencing any sort of error, it will automatically pull it out of the load balance bundle and alerts somebody to go take action and at the address. This means our clients are happy because they are not receiving strange errors because somebody's typed something somewhere incorrectly and we are happy because our uptime is reliable.

The solution could improve the documentation.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately 

The stability is very good. We have to power off a system to reboot it after firmware or other updates, but I have not had a problem with the stability of the units at all. We had a system cluster go down but that was a physical issue with the hard drive. They shipped us out a new one, plugged it back in, and it almost self-configures. We had to put some details in the hard drive, but it takes the configuration from the other units and runs well. We have had zero downtime over the last five years.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very scalable. We have recently expanded the cluster to five nodes and I am running in an active scenario. I did the upgrade live and it did not require any downtime.

The technical support is good. I have not had any problem asking questions that a support person can not answer. Technical support is not engineering and that was something that I had to learn. If you have something that is already functional and you need to figure out why it stopped working, why it is now broken, or you did an upgrade and something is wrong, the technical support can help with that. I have called them a dozen times over the five years and they have had my issue resolved within approximately one hour.

Setting up the solution on the systems is not difficult but enabling applications and configuration can be complex. The difficulty level can also depend on the environment, we have a more complex environment. You have to have some base knowledge of the solution for what you are doing before you can go do it. Configuring the solution is not something that a layperson is going to be able to do. You have to know what you are looking for before you will be able to find it.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is they need to do their research ahead of time and know what problems you are trying to solve. In our case, our solutions engineer from F5 directly has been amazing. If you receive a good team in account management, they can point you in the right direction, and in a lot of cases, they can get you moving along. The support from him has been tremendous, it has been extremely valuable.

Our configuration is not simple. There is some custom code that is written in our system, but everything works as they say it should, it is a great solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an eight out of ten.