Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

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 the Kemp Load balancer with our on-premise Exchange 2016 using two servers on a DAG at different locations. The Kemp load balancer allows us to have a hands-off failover between servers either in a Disaster Recovery model or during upgrades for security patches or service pack updates for the Exchange software.

We are now expanding this for our corporate webserver that will also be hosted at both of our locations. We have more confidence in having on-premise applications than trusting the Cloud. 

Our organization is better protected from an email outage than before. The old process of manually having to redirect Outlook Web Access traffic and Email traffic to a second server is a thing of the past.

I can sleep at night because of the Kemp Load Balancer, just knowing that in case of a failover, the email will keep flowing and our users will have access in the morning.

Having near 100% uptime for email is critical. Without email access, we would lose business

With the move from our second Exchange server to the second data center, the GEO function allows the Kemp LoadMaster / Balancer to work together.

We originally deployed Kemp when we had both Exchange servers at one site. That was good to start with, but as we upgraded to Exchange 2016, we needed to have devices that would handle this increased functionality. The GEO functionality made this happen, allowing the two devices to see each other and determine the failover in either a Disaster Recover of software patch scenario.

I can think of three things that would be nice; First, it would be helpful if the GEO function was built into every device. The cost of the GEO upgrade is not cost-prohibitive but it's something that would be a nice add-in, out of the box.

The second is the throughput. If the device was licensed based on the throughput then we could upgrade hardware to get better transactional throughput.

Third, if they had dual power supply options on the lower end models it would be helpful because I may be a smaller shop with only 35 servers, but I still rely on dual power supplies whenever possible.

Switchcraft has been using Kemp Load balancer for about three years.

Kemp is very stable and we have never had an issue.

You need to upgrade devices to increase the scale.

Support has been easy to deal with. I have only needed to contact them a few times during the initial setup. Once it's been in place and operational, we have not needed to mess with the system, which is a huge advantage.

Kemp was my first experience with load balancers.

The initial setup was easy.

Our partner was great. They had used the devices before, which made it easy.

ROI was immediate, as it gives us peace of mind that email would stay up. Call it insurance.

Set up was easy; nothing is cheap nowadays but it is well worth the cost

We did not look at other solutions, as it was recommended by our Consulting partner on the project.

The Kemp load balancer is well suited for an on-premise Exchange system, either at one location or at two.

It is also suitable to use for balancing web site traffic between systems..

Kemp works well when used with two or more units in a multi-site environment  I have not found a solution that the Kemp will not handle well.

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 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.

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.

Kemp LoadMaster is used for the high resiliency of the application. The most beneficial function of using the ADC is to ensure this resiliency.

There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution. 

It's been using Kemp LoadMaster for only less than a year. It's only for basic ADC functions.

It is a stable solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

The scalability of the solution is good. There are currently four to five customers using the solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us around two weeks to completely deploy the solution.

For the deployment process, We usually start with ForeSee to show them the value, and then the management evaluates and reviews the result of our POC after we present it to them. And after that, we end the process.

The price is cheaper than other options, so I don't have a problem with it. 

The user interface is good. The integration is also not an issue for the customers. The integration so far has been advanced for the customers, and I have no problems with it.

I recommend considering the pricing model because the solution has good performance and a competitive price. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The solution is used for load balancing the servers. 

The solution is easy to configure when changing the load balancing method to Round Robin or least connection.

In the next release, they can introduce 360 views in the same dashboard to make it easier for users to view. The graphical information should be displayed on the dashboard.

It is a stable solution. I give nine point five out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. I give nine point five out of ten.

The support team is very communicative and provides fairly good support.

The solution is easy to setup. I would rate it a nine-point five out of ten. It was deployed within two days by two engineers.

The pricing is alright and we pay a monthly licensing fee

We primarily use this solution as an application load balancer internally and externally for load balancing of web-based software.

The pricing of the solution is valuable.

The ability to see live traffic is not great and can be improved. When we check live traffic via the external link, we sometimes see up to 80 concurrent connections but find it difficult to drill down into them. So although we can see 80, we can't drill down to get more information about those 80 connections. Additionally, the graphics for the solution can be improved.

We have been using the solution for approximately three years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We are currently using the load balancer for six internal and external applications. During the last utilization, we noticed that we're barely doing 20%, so I believe we can have more applications.

Regarding people managing and using it, 6% are in telecom and are responsible for Kemp LoadMaster, but approximately a thousand users are connecting to it internally.

I rate customer service and support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten. It is easy.

I believe this solution has the best pricing in the market. It is a corporate price.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good, but its ability to investigate life traffic and its graphics can be improved. My advice for users considering this solution is to ensure they have adherent to deploy it.

Our primary use case of this solution is for simple things like balancing web servers or balancing remote desktop servers. My company is based in Brazil. We are resellers of this solution, usually to small and middle size businesses.

The most valuable features for us are the web balancing and remote access balancing - the product is flawless in regard to these things. The installation is very simple and I like the interface.

I've only used the virtual version of the small LoadManager (VLM-500), but on the "improvement" side my comment would be about the equivalent hardware based LM (LM-X1) to offer redundant power supply like the more beefier KEMP models do. No matter the size, the role played by these solutions tend to be critical for the business.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

Stability is great, I've never had any issues with it.  

I cannot vouch for scalability because I've never dealt with scaling.

The technical support is really good and I've only needed to use the product manual a couple of times. It was extremely efficient and easy to follow. Whenever I need, I can exchange mails or phone calls with their support and they are very quick, and everything works just fine.

The installation is done remotely and I never visit our customers to deploy. The configuration, the operation and the planning is all done remotely. The product is flawless and all the customers are really happy. The price is very good too compared to the other solutions. Of course, it's aimed at small and medium businesses. I cannot tell you anything about big enterprise or about the higher end LoadMaster. Initial deployment takes a few minutes. 

This is a very competitive solution - they have a very solid product and it's cheaper than other solutions. There is no need to look at anything else because of the cost and you have an especially good product to do simple things. 

Our primary use is to provide application load balancing for inbound SMTP mail and webmail for Microsoft Exchange.

We have also used the product to load balance Citrix applications and delivery controllers. In our Citrix environment, it is much easier to implement, manage, and use versus Citrix's own Netscaler that we have used in the past.

It fixed our issue with internal webmail and SMTP overload. The product works exactly as advertised and we are thrilled with it. We now have webpage acceleration and can even load balance geographically with virtual boxes in our Microsoft Azure space.

Kemp basically has taken the overloading of one of our servers and now spreads it across three servers without any hiccups. We have excellent performance, see real data for our connections, and have no complaints from our end users. That is a very big help for us!

The user interface is very easy to work with. We did not have to hire outside services to implement what we figured out ourselves and saved plenty of money.

Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for 10 years.

We have had zero stability problems, ever!

It works well.  You can make them an HA pair or put in larger units if required with an easy upgrade path moving the configuration from one bx to another.

We made one phone call and the problem was resolved, immediately. We had a resolution in 12 minutes!

My understanding is the company is built from engineers who left a competitor and took what people complained about at the original company and made it into a better product. Their support always picks up within minutes. In this day and age, sitting around waiting for techs to pick up the phone is a draining task! I do not like companies that have poorly trained engineers who don't pick up the phone!

Their support team is based in the US and that helps us as well. They seem to understand that we only call if there is a problem we cannot solve. Their engineers are really well trained and understand the root of the problem immediately, almost every time. Again, it's hard to complain about this product as we love it!

We tried a few products and they were expensive and overly complicated.

The initial setup was very easy. The configuration took about 20 minutes through a web browser.

We implemented and deployed in-house.

For about $2,500, we have already made our money back!

At $2,500 USD, this is absolutely a fantastic buy for the money!

We went with Kemp after trying other products like the Netscaler, the F5 solutions, and a few other lesser-known vendors. The Kemp solution gave us everything in the box without having to pay for any additional licenses.

Overall, the product has covered what we needed and even offered some additional features.

It's really hard to say what can be improved when we do not have any complaints, to begin with. I just have to say that even Microsoft named Kemp their preferred load balancer for Microsoft Exchange in the past.