Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

Previously, we were using the Microsoft TMG server as a proxy to protect our Exchange server. We recently decided to upgrade the Exchange server, but the MS TMG server support had expired. I was looking for a solution that could provide a similar function.

While I was talking to a consultant, they recommended the Kemp load balancer. On top of the proxy server, I also configured Exchange with DAG, so we needed load balancing as well. After reviewing the product, we installed it and it's doing a great job.

Our primary requirement is to load balance and protect the Exchange active sync and OWA requests. My requirement was only for a proxy, but it provided us load balancing as well. This means that my overall solution is more robust and reliable.

In addition, the software is tiny and can be managed using the web portal, which we didn't have before. This means that managing the software is very easy. It also shows live usage and load on the server, which is really helpful. Their tech support is also really helpful if you need help or add any new rules. I am still exploring the product and planning on using it for more. 

1. Installation: The software looks simple but can provide very complex solutions. The installation is really easy if you have a virtual environment (e.g. VMware).
2. Configuration: The configuration is really easy and the web portal is self-explanatory.
3. Features: Proxy and load balancing are valuable features. We are only using it for Exchange load balancing, and it works great.
4. Tech support: Their technical support is excellent. We have 24-hour tech support. They are very knowledgeable and ready to help.
   

I have not seen a product that is as simple to use as this.

The only thing that I miss is that the TMG server was giving me live information about who is connected and what is the request about. Details include the username, etc. I know Kemp gives you some live load info, but not the authentication data unless I am not aware of it.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about ten months.

It is very stable.

They have multiple tiers of licensing and you can upgrade it easily. I updated my license without any hiccups.

Their customer service and tech support are excellent.

Their technical support team leads you in the right direction. If we have a question about the features then they help configure them as well.

I did use the Microsoft TMG server, but its tech support expired and is no longer available.

Since I was not familiar with the product, it seemed complex. With the help of their tech support, I now understood it and find that it's really simple. 

I took some assistance from the vendor and they helped with installing it. This is something that I could have done if I had referred the documentation. They also did the basic configuration. The next configuration was done with the help of tech support.

The cost of the solution is very low compared to the ROI. 

The installation and setup are really easy if you refer to the documentation. Or, you can pay a maximum of two hours for a consultant and they can help. The vendor's tech support is really helpful, as well.

I did not evaluate other options. This product was suggested by my consultant and I trust him.

I love this product ad definitely recommend it to others. I know that it can do much more than I use it for. So far, I have not looked into other features but I am planning on expanding the usage in near future.

I am getting some updates from them about added features to the product.

I will be working on a few more projects and planning on using it for these.

We use LoadMaster for load balancing our Exchange, Skype for Business, LDAP, Citrix, and SharePoint solutions. We have virtual services setup for traffic originating from inside and outside our network and can manage them separately.

These sites each have certificates and we can update and manage them in one place, which is really helpful with our wildcard certificate that applies to multiple services. We also use the load balancers to manage some security protocols we want to allow or deny per application.

We are able to take balanced servers offline for maintenance without interruption or late nights. This is very helpful to role out things like Windows Updates to our Exchange servers and put them back into the mix, monitoring for logs or user helpdesk tickets for issues before rolling them out to the other servers.

We can even make protocol changes per real servers and watch for their influence on traffic to that server specifically. We have done this many times for older security protocols we want to block such as old RC4, SSL, and TLS.

One of the most valuable features I like is the ability to block specific cipher suites like RC4, and older protocols like SSL 3.0. We were also able to block TLS1.3 as it was causing issues with Android phones connecting to Skype and we could do that with one checkbox in one place.

Another nice feature is the ability to introduce new servers into an application without the need to do interruptive forklift changes to our most critical applications.

It is also easy to apply our wildcard certificate in one place and it is instantly used by all of the sites that point to it at once.  

The only thing I have struggled with is setting up automatic backups. When the job runs, it doesn't seem to do anything and the backup file never shows up in the destination folder.  When I run a manual backup it works fine, but it just dumps the file to my local downloads folder. Otherwise, all of the features that it offers work well for us and it hasn't yet let us down.

We have been using LoadMaster for the past four years.

The product is very stable! We never had an outage in the four years that I've been with the company.

We have been able to manage about 20 virtual services at our highest with two LoadMasters and performance-wise they were easily able to handle the load, even though most of our sites use certificates at the LoadMaster and real-server level.

Technical support is always great for me. They respond quickly when a case is opened online and I have always had a very knowledgeable agent when I cold call them. It does not take them 30 minutes to figure out what we have set up, they always diagnose and resolve quickly for me.

Kemp was our first product to use.

It was straightforward once we understood the setup, and the support was a great help.  

Our in-house team was responsible for deployment.

We are a hospital and none of our patient applications run through our load balancers, so ROI isn't calculated.

This product was in place before I started with the company.

I would advise that you use the virtual appliances if you can. We did have a hardware failure twice on our original physical appliances and it is a bit of a vulnerability to go down to one LoadMaster while the other one is in the shop.

I can't think of any services I would like to add, as I haven't come across a situation where I wanted it to do something that it couldn't do.

It's been a great reliable product for us, and I would recommend it to anyone!

We use it to load balance our ADFS serves. We also have it set up at our DR location when we need to switch over to DR. We have it set up and just flip the server over and since we have it set up at DR, once the IPs are swapped to the new DR IP range it picks up and starts working in our DR location.

We also use it for our main application. We have multiple app servers that people log on to which allows us to keep the logins spread out among the servers. And if we need to take one down we can force the user to one server. 

It was a total mess using the Windows Load balancer, it was not easy to work with. Switching to Kemp has made our lives so much easier. We can now swap machines and users around based on the needs if something goes up and or down. We are allowed to take machines up and down as we please. We can also take machines to DR and use the same thing at our DR location. It has improved our DR and emergency issues and almost eliminated it. It's hard to believe we can cut it down to almost no time. Kemp has made it so much easier. I would recommend it. 

The feature that allows us to easily disconnect a server when we need and bring back online is the most valuable. It's a click of a button. This allows us to keep all systems up. We can then run updates, perform reboots whatever we need to one of the servers without taking production down.

In the old days, we had to kill both servers and reboot only at a certain time. Now, we can do it as we please, and when the server comes back up, we check to see if the green button shows and we move onto the next. This feature allows us to do work and keep things running.

It works well, we really can't think of anything to make it easier They have templates that you can import that do most of the work for you anyways.

If I had to change something it would maybe be to have a little better reporting graphics that show more details in the reporting. It seems to be a little small in the graphic, and I'm not sure if possible but maybe a GUI page that one can use to monitor if any server goes down. And not sure a full login, so we can login to another page if something happens. Besides better GUI things i'm not sure. 

We have had it for about 3+ years.

They run with no issues, the only time we had issues was when the user rebooted by accident. The product runs with little overhead to servers. 

Allows for the growth of other virtual services with no issues at all.

Anytime we have issues they are quick to respond and we are giving a tech that knows the answer. We are not handed off to level 1 and then level 2 two days later. They know their stuff from the get-go. 

Microsoft LB and was recommended by a Vendor we used for a project. 

The setup was straightforward, support was a dream to work with.

Kemp PS helped and they were amazing, 

Not sure about exact numbers but the time and effort we don't spend dealing with it, makes up for it. 

You won't need anything they offer great support and licensing was super easy. 

The only thing we evaluated was what level we needed for our needs. 

I recommend Kemp to all, product works great and makes jobs easier. 

We use Kemp to balance the load of connections to various places. We have IIS, RDP, API, gateway servers, and objects that get over 5000 connections that are balanced with Kemp. 

We have had very good success at getting this working properly and doing exactly what we need. We need to balance resources and utilize the Kemp Loadmaster to organize the servers and resources to keep them operating at an optimal level. RDP and Gateway servers are 99.99% uptime so having Kemp in the middle makes that an easy transition if there is an outage or server error.

We used to manually balance the load and we overallocated resources to account for this situation. Since we started using Kemp, we have become more reliable and have less downtime. We also have the added resources back now that we can allocate the precise need. There is another added bonus, we can have rolling updates because we can balance the load and update inactive servers or resources.

We have had our uptime guarantee enhanced because of the Kemp tools and resources. The load that our servers can handle has been minimized and resources have been restored.  

Persistence is very valuable. This holds the connection information of the source and that connection is important to RDP and our APO calls. The connection has to be persisted to the original source to operate properly. We also use the subsections for sub-services to create services inside our services for our API resources, this is most awesome. We would not be able to do this without Kemp and offer this type of sub-service to route based on an API instance. It routes the traffic properly based on the sub-service type. 

I would like to see more automation and control of overactive and inactive resources. If I could schedule these around our updates then it would be all automated. I would like to set up an automated script to coincide with the scripts I use to update resources and servers. If I update a server on Wednesday then I would use Kemp to automate the server being taken out of service before and then put back into service after. That could streamline the whole update process and it should do some simple checks and tests to make sure the server or resource is reliable and able to be reached. 

We have been using Kemp for about five years now. 

I have only had one issue in five years, so I would say the stability is impeccable. 

It scales for everything we have grown to need and more so far! 

Kemp has the best customer service of all the vendors we use. 

We used DNS Round-robin and some manual intervention but it was unreliable and very time-consuming. 

I had support walk me through the setup. They happily helped me before I was even a client. They set up the first service with me and I had it in production that same day! 

I implemented this myself. It is turn key ready with various templates that are plug and play. 

We have saved on man-hours from the manual intervention we used to do as well as the resources we saved from right-sizing our resources that we could then use in other areas. 

The return is triple what we invest. 

I would advise them to take advantage of the trials and support. Use the support to set it up exactly the way you want and see how much actually need to pay for. 

I looked at Barracuda but the support was terrible and so I went with Kemp and am so glad I did. The support has been stellar. 

Go with Kemp, you will thank me later. 

We use the Kemp Loadmaster to load-balance enterprise-wide applications that require high-availability. We also wanted to make sure the performance and throughput meet the needs of the usage of our applications.

These applications include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Microsoft SharePoint (2010, 2013), file sharing servers, multiple public-facing websites, multiple internal websites, on-premise IT Service Management applications, and others.

The LoadMaster handles both production and development environments for these applications.

The Kemp LoadMaster was very easy to deploy and we initially deployed without needing much tech support help. The management is very intuitive and can easily be used by techs without needing extensive training to use.

The LoadMaster met all of the features and performance we were looking for at a very affordable price. We were also looking to lessen the real estate rack space in our data centers and really wanted a virtual solution that will work with our Hyper-V environment.

Having a Hyper-V image that we easily deployed to multiple Hyper-V clusters allowed us to achieve high availability with the LoadMaster.

The templates provided by Kemp for well-known applications like Exchange and SharePoint make these applications very easy to deploy. When the templates are used, there is not much left to configure and they just work!

I have used and evaluated templates from other load balancing vendors, but still required extra help from a technician just to make the application work correctly. This is a little frustrating sometimes since you would think that the template should just work.

I have not had any issues with any of the LoadMaster templates at all.

Out of the box, the LoadMaster provides real-time statistics regarding connections to the real servers, as well as to the virtual services. We see the number of connections in the last 5/30/60 minutes, and current active connections as well. However, it would be nice if we were able to drill in further to see the actual IP addresses that made up these connections, whether they were coming from the internet or internal, and possibly the option to disconnect certain active connections.

The historical graphs showing CPU metrics and the network is useful, as well. It would be nice if the historical metrics were easily exportable from the interface.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for the past nine years. This was eight years using the hardware-based LoadMaster, and less than a year on the virtual LoadMaster platform.

We like the stability of the LoadMaster setup on high-availability, running two separate Hyper-V clusters. We have tested HA failover of the virtual devices a few times now and failover worked perfectly each time.

Since we are using virtual LoadMasters, we are certain that we can easily scale when needed without needing extra hardware.

Kemp customer service is excellent. When I had submitted a ticket for questions I had, the response was almost immediate and they made sure to always follow up with me just to check that everything was to our satisfaction.

We switched from a prior solution since the LoadMaster provided the features, performance and throughput that we required for a more affordable price point.

The initial setup is very easy since we were provided an image for our hypervisor. Technical documentation was provided and it was very easy to follow and initially configure without needing extra technical help.

We implemented in-house.

Our ROI on the Kemp LoadMaster is very positive.

It is well-priced and licensing is very flexible.

We looked at Radware and F5.

The LoadMaster is very easy to set up, configure, and manage. We have been using it for almost 10 years and are still very happy with this solution.

We currently utilize the Kemp LoadMaster VLM-500 series virtual appliances in our VMware environment. Initially, we were running with only a single appliance, but recently added a second to allow for High Availability pairing between them.

Our primary use for the LoadMaster appliances is to provide load balancing between our two Microsoft Exchange servers in our Office 365 hybrid environment. This has allowed us to obtain redundancy between them, rather than having a single point of failure for our email environment.                   

Before we implemented the Kemp LoadMasters into our Microsoft Exchange environment, we were operating our SMTP relay and OWA traffic directly to the Exchange server itself. This put us in a bad spot when it came to patching and maintenance, as well as when we had service-impacting Exchange issues occur on the server. 

By implementing load balancing via our Kemp LoadMaster, we were able to add an additional Exchange server into our environment, which allowed us to failover manually for maintenance, as well as have a backup for unexpected issues

The most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster. We have never run into any service-impacting issues with the appliance itself, but having a second one allows us to reduce the downtime associated with maintenance upgrades to zero. 

I also appreciate the online licensing feature, which lets us update and install licenses on the appliances by simply logging into our KempID account. It was nice not to have to fuss with licensing and key file download/uploads.

So far, the only hitch we have run into is that would have been nice to have an easier method to add allow/whitelist entries into the Access Control lists for virtual services. 

Following an upgrade, we inadvertently lost all of our Access Control whitelist entries on one of our virtual services. Thankfully we had a backup of them, but to plug them back in, we had to enter them all manually. This ended up being a bit of a pain.

It would be great if there was a way to upload a .CSV file of ACL entries into the access control list, rather than having to add them one at a time.

We've been using Kemp LoadMaster for approximately five years.

We ran a single (non-redundant) LoadMaster appliance in our VMware environment for close to five years with zero outages caused by it, so I am very impressed with the stability of KEMP's devices. The only reason we explored adding a second appliance for High Availability was to make maintenance easier.

We've had other virtual appliances in the past that had to be rebooted occasionally, but that is not the case with the Kemp LoadMaster. They are rock solid in terms of stability.
 

We so far have not come anywhere near utilizing the total throughput of the appliances we have. They have no problems keeping up.

The customer service was great! They helped me to quickly resolve two licensing-related issues with our additional appliance purchase.

We did not previously use load balancing, Kemp was our first choice.

The initial setup is a breeze and is well documented.

It was implemented in-house using only Kemp documentation and no outside support.

Pricing for the perpetual licensing was fair to us for the features and ease of use we received.

We also evaluated Citrix NetScaler.

The VLM appliances boot insanely quickly, which is really impressive. During power cycles, we only drop between two and three pings to the devices.

We use LoadMaster for HA Clustered Pair Load Balancer for primarily Exchange on-premises deployment and all supporting services (SMTP, ActiveSync, Autodiscovery, OWA/EWS, etc.)  Secondarily, for non-Exchange, application-server-based mail routing.

We implemented in 2014 as a dedicated load handling solution for inbound on-prem internal Exchange SMTP. We soon adapted the appliances to handle more tasks such as VIP-based routing to our middleware MTAs, mobile devices via ActiveSync, Outlook Autodiscover services Exchange Web Services & Outlook Web Access.

It has greatly fortified the performance and uptime of our front-door email ingress, simplified and segmented mail routing, and reduced admin overhead for mail issue resolution and troubleshooting.

The ease of the UI has allowed several relatively untrained admins to take over administrative duties, firmware upgrades, service monitoring, issue troubleshooting, and basic maintenance tasks like failover/failbacks.

It has also given us previously lacking visibility into mail flow metrics, service-based volume, connection issue granularity, and high availability.

The Virtual Service setup, maintenance & monitoring, the straightforward setup, ease of configuration changes, and simple investigation of issues are the most valuable features. 

The ability to rapidly and without interruption, redirect traffic from place to place, set up testing environments, and use as a tool to eliminate variables in downstream application/real Servers when they are having issues are also valuable.

The true real-time monitoring of service interruptions downstream have been a very valuable tool for us when troubleshooting end to end transmission issues.

Certificate installations could be simplified and modernized, and allowed to be monitored for expirations/issues.

We had a particular issue where we believed the Kemp LoadMaster was to blame for service disruption of a particular VIP (virtual-IP) based service, based on the supporting evidence. In the end, it was actually expired certificates downstream, which was not the Kemp's fault per se but it would have helped greatly and reduced our time with support if the Kemp had an alert for this type of problem, without needing to search logs/packet capture.

I have been using Kemp LoadMaster for more than seven years.

In 20 years in IT with over a dozen similar products used, it ranks easily in my top 3 for overall uptime and stability of application/IP-based load balancers.

We only use a 2 node cluster but the scalability at the hardware level seems to be mostly effortless. Partners can be added relatively easily.

Scaling up the number of VIPs/services is likewise as effortless. Performance seems very good for the roughly 20 VIP/services we use it for.

Kemp's Support is the best in the business, having opened several tickets with them over the years they have always excelled and never disappointed.

Yes, because we were upgrading the entire organization's Exchange version and we wanted a better, HA Clustered solution to match the Exchange redundancy we had built.

From what I have gleaned it was straightforward but we had a 3rd party set it up for us.

Vendor Team, very high level of expertise. The purchase of this product was suggested solely by him due to his past successes with deploying it.

I have not quantified actual ROI numbers but given the longevity and high-usage of this appliance I would imagine very high, easily our top 15% of IT Infrastructure ROI.

We did hire a 3rd party professional service contractor for the setup, however, he was already used to implement the Exchange build-out. This added some cost to it but may have not been needed since the Kemp design and initial config seems very straightforward.

Purchasers may want to consider this setup expense depending on their own staff confidence level.

We use an on-premises Skype for Business Server VoIP service that utilizes the Kemp LoadMaster LM-2400 for service resiliency. This allows our three front-end servers to seamlessly support our service. We never miss a call and our chat service is always ready as a result.

Kemp has a pre-made virtual service profile that perfectly fits our use case so the initial setup is quite easy. We also have expanded the use of the LoadMaster to accommodate a number of ancillary services that also require resilience.

The Kemp LoadMaster is easy to set up, well documented, and very easy to maintain. It has done a flawless job supporting our Microsoft Skype for Business Server VoIP services, as well as expanding to cover a number of other services that require load balancing.

The LoadMaster has helped to keep our Voice over IP services in-house, which has produced tremendous savings versus hosting our services in the cloud. This has allowed us to devote our resources to other projects, increasing our overall effectiveness.

The load balancing features of the LoadMaster are the best we have used.

Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid. Kemp maintains a library of templates pre-configured for a number of services, including Microsoft Skype for Business Server. This makes configuring the virtual services very easy. It also makes it very easy to add additional virtual services as you find new use cases. The convenience of being able to download new or updated templates from Kemp's support site cannot be understated.

If I had to pick an area for improvement, I think it would be direct integration with the template library. At present, you need to download the templates from the Kemp support portal and then upload them onto the LoadMaster. It would be much easier to have the management interface directly integrate with the Kemp Support library, allowing you to choose the desired template from the online catalog to then directly download to the LoadMaster.

We first implemented our Kemp LoadMaster eight years ago when we launched a new VoIP project that required load balancing for enhanced reliability.

The stability is rock solid. We have only experienced one issue in eight years. Kemp support was all over it and got us back online in no time.

For our organization, the LM-2400 is perfectly sized. I'm sure it has an upper limit but we have not gotten anywhere near it yet.

Kemp tech support has been absolutely fantastic. 

We have had one hardware issue, which over a span of eight years isn't bad at all, and one setup question. Both of these issues were handled quickly and to our satisfaction.

Previously, we had been using a Barracuda load balancer. It was nice but the management was not as easy to use and it was not quite as reliable as we would have liked.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The virtual service templates provided by Kemp make setup a snap!

We used a vendor team but our assigned technician was not familiar with networking or load balancing. I ended up taking over the setup and it couldn't have been easier.

The Kemp LoadMaster is a tremendous value. It works well and is easy to set up and to maintain.

Barracuda and F5 were evaluated as well. The performance and value were found to be much better with the Kemp LoadMaster.

The Kemp LoadMaster just works. It is extraordinarily difficult to suggest any changes that might improve its feature set. Go with Kemp, you won't regret it!