F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

I use BIG-IP LTM for load balancing and WAF.

The multi-data center is perfect.

BIG-IP LTM's sandboxing integration could be improved.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for two to three years.

BIG-IP LTM is completely stable, and its performance is good.

I believe BIG-IP LTM is scalable, but you have to pay for extra expansions.

The initial setup was straightforward, and I would rate the ease of the setup process as 4.5 out of five. The ACC deployment took one day, but the WAF tuning took around two weeks because it was a new application and needed tuning.

We used an in-house team.

I would rate our ROI as 4.5 out of five.

BIG-IP LTM isn't a cheap solution - I'd rate its pricing as three out of five.

I evaluated Citrix 40 Web.

You need an expert to set up the policies, as it's not a straightforward process. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of nine out of ten.

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.

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.

All of our web servers are load-balanced by F5.

The iRule feature is very useful for inspecting HTTP. Sometimes, we use it for modifying the headers of the HTTP.

F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud.

Recently, we were investigating offloading SSL as version TLS 1.3. I am not sure if we were able to do that or not.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

It is very stable.

They have a host where you can increase the CPUs dedicated for load balancing. You can mount a cluster to escalate, but in order to escalate, you need to virtualize the solution. Otherwise, you need to change the device and load something bigger.

I contacted them in the past. They provide good support.

I have used a Cisco solution in the past, but they discontinued the solution or the hardware. F5 is much better.

It is very easy. It depends a bit on what you want, but in one day or two days, you can have F5 load balancing on backend servers. It is very easy.

I would recommend others to choose a virtualized solution. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes.

The security on offer from the solution is very good.

The stability is excellent.

The pricing of the product is a bit too high. They should work to make it more affordable. It needs to be more cost-efficient. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance has been good.

I've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are when it comes to servicing their customers, having never used them personally.

I also have experience with Check Point. 

We did not install the solution ourselves. We used an integrator that handled the process and helped us set everything up. 

We used an integrator to assist with the installation. We were pleased with the results. There was nothing to complain about the results.

The pricing is pretty high. It's not the least expensive option.

That said, we're willing to pay for the premium security on offer.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

We are using the 12th version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite satisfied with the capabilities of the product.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies.