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.

Our company e-mail and mobile communication system, which is based on Exchange Servers, needed load-balancing and security. After a few discussions with resellers and external consultants, we decided on the Kemp Load Balancer solution.

Our installation is a virtual Kemp Load Balancer based on VMware. We have configured four  Exchange Servers in a DAG configuration and we have been very satisfied since it was installed. In the future, we would like to map further services via the Kemp.

For us and our e-mail and mobile communication system, the load-balancing and security features are very well-suited. 

From the installation and configuration to the daily routine, Kemp is great. Importing and defining the rules for the communication systems was quick and easy. Various services and ports are configured for our e-mail and mobile communication system, and we configured some Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the Web Application Firewall (WAF).

 After the configuration was complete, we found that we can still use Kemp for more services. 

The most valuable feature is that load-balancing, as Kemp helps to maintain the uptime from the e-mail servers.

If we have or need a maintenance window for one of the other e-mail servers, Kemp will still deliver your e-mail traffic to the other server. It just works.

It is easy to apply windows updates to your Exchange environment, and using the Kemp Load Balancer made it easier to handle.

Another great feature is the ability to use the Kemp Load Balancer virtual appliance in our VMware environment.

In the web interface, there are a lot of settings in the different menus and it would be helpful if there were an interactive help system or tooltips to help the administrators find and configure the right settings.

The configuration of "standard" services is quite easy but when you configure more advanced settings, it's no longer easy and can be challenging. The Kemp Load Balancer is a very good product out of the VMware ISO (Box).

Sometimes, you feel years back in the web interface but it's just cosmetic.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for nearly two years.

Stability-wise, this is a great product.

The scalability is great.

We had contact with customer service/technical support for the license renewal and i can say the contact was very helpful and friendly, just great. Until now all our questions have been answered and resolved by the vendor.

We haven't tried any other solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It was a mix between in-house and vendor team, and the expertise of the vendor team is awesome.

There is no ROI. It is for security reasons that we decided to use the Kemp Load Balancer solution. We no longer wanted the traffic to go directly to the Exchange servers.

The costs for the Kemp Load Balancer solution are okay because, for a good product, you have to spend money.

We did not evaluate other products. We thought about some other solutions in theory but ultimately decided in favor of Kemp.

Its a Kemp it works great.

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 use Kemp LoadMaster for our SharePoint environment, worldwide.

We use Kemp to improve the security and availability of our web services, to external customers and partners, as well as a custom banquet application that is accessed over a cloud connection.

The Kemp LoadMaster gives us load balancing and reverse proxy capabilities, as well as a web application firewall to protect our web application environment and website.

We use the technology across the entire organization to solve the issue of site performance and availability for external users when booking and managing events.

Kemp and the application are hidden in the background and are always working. Kemp is great for organizations that feel they have been squeezed by traditional higher-priced load-balancer vendors (F5).

Kemp stood out from day one, with a lot of flexibility in how you can deploy and purchase the products. As a software product, they give you a seamless experience, whether you deploy it in the cloud or in your existing networking closet/data center.

Load-balancing is a great feature that is very easy to configure and it is always working fine.

If you find that something is not working you can make a feature request. A few weeks later, the feature could be implemented with a new update.

Installing updates is very easy and always works well.

The response time after a reboot is good.

The product could be improved by making the SSL Offloading easier.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about seven years.

The Kemp support team is outstanding. They were very helpful; not only did they help us to better understand the technical capabilities of Kemp, but also, they helped us resolve an issue with our VMware environment that had nothing to do with the Kemp deployment. The Kemp support actually tipped us off to the issue.

These guys are truly experts and didn't give us the run-around. They can explain everything.

I don't know what feature could be made better, as it is working really well.

We have a small number of internal web servers that we host on-premises in our data center, along with other services that need to be accessible from the public internet. These include Remote Desktop servers, an SFTP server, Exchange, etc.

All of these servers need extra protection on top of our standard firewall, intrusion detection, and endpoint protection.

The primary use case of Kemp is the reverse proxy for added protection, and load balancing for better performance. We are able to leverage Kemp to protect our web servers by adding content rules and restrictions.

We will continue to add more resources as needed behind Kemp. 

Kemp is a great product to have in our organization.

For our use case, it provides an additional security layer by using the reverse proxy process to protect my real servers. Using Kemp as a front-facing service appliance, it allows me to have the flexibility of swapping out real servers behind the scenes without any intervention from my network team.

Using the content rules restriction gives me the power to block off certain sections of the web pages if there is a need to do so. The load balancer aspect will allow me to optimally offload traffic evenly across my servers. 

For now, the reverse proxy feature is a great feature used to protect my public-facing servers. It is configured to restrict/control certain protocols from hitting my actual servers.

Though not a feature of the product, tech support from the company is also a feature as part of the overall solution that is very valuable. I was able to get in touch with an engineer within a few minutes of calling the support line. I was able to resolve my issue pretty quickly once we restructured a few things within the environment.

Overall, the Kemp appliance seems to have performed very well for me over the years.

If there is anything that needs to be updated, the GUI can get a refresh to make it look more like 2020, although it is just a cosmetic change.

It would be a plus if there were a real-time live traffic capture that allows administrators to see the current traffic that is coming into the appliance. Currently, you can only start the TCPdump capture and have the information logged into a file.

Maybe a configurable dashboard to show more detail about each VS service would be welcome.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for three years.

KEMP is very stable as we have not had any downtime using this appliance.

Scalability-wise, it works very well for me.

Very pleased with the experience of talking to the tech support team.

We have another solution in place and we are currently planning to retire it, now that Kemp has been implemented.

The selection was made before I came on board.

It is a great product and service support is awesome.

Our primary use for the Kemp LoadMaster is load balancing our exchange and IIS web services to be able to meet the high availability standard for our organization. We get additional security features so there is no need to make these configuration steps on a server again. With the offloading capability, you can even secure servers that normally can't be secured.

Currently, we are using it with our web servers and exchange, for both internal and external access. Also, the reverse proxy is one of the greatest benefits.

We use Kemp to improve the security and availability of our web properties to external customers and partners, as well as a custom banquet application that is accessed over a cloud connection.

The Kemp LoadMaster gives us load balancing/reverse proxy capabilities as well as a web application firewall to protect our web application environment and website.

We use the technology across the entire organization to solve the issue of site performance and availability issues of our applications to external users when booking and managing events.

The most valuable features for us are the Load Balancing and Web Application Firewall, as we have a lot of web applications. It was difficult to meet the high availability without doubling most of the work. With the WAF, we can publish without risking our infrastructure being internet-facing.

The following features are also valuable:

• TLS (SSL) Offload
• Layer 7 Content Switching
• High Availability (Active/Standby)
• Health Checking
• Permit /Deny Access Control Lists
• IP address filtering
• IPsec Tunnel support
• DDoS mitigation, including L7 rate-based attacks
• IPSec VPN to Azure, AWS, vCloud Air public clouds
• Authenticated NTP
  

From my point of view, the only minor thing that needed to be improved is log management. It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event.

Log management is critical for investigating an attack or unwanted behavior. Since they have a lot of logs, it takes a lot of time to look for a specific event. Also, for the WAF, it would be great if they can provide a dashboard or insight dashboard for WAF logs.

other than that there is nothing need to be improved from kemp

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for three years.

very stable, since 3 years we didn't face any issues 

very easy to scale the solution

very helpful technical team

We used to work with Windows NLB, and we switched to Kemp to meet a higher level of stability and quality of service.

straightforward, using the documentation provided by kemp

in-house

This product has good value and features for the money.

Prior to choosing Kemp, we evaluated Zen Load Balancer and NGINX. Comparing price and features, Kemp was the best option for us.

Basically, Kemp covers every critical thing that must be needed to complete the task at hand.

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.