Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

We use this to load balance internal and external IT systems ranging from a few connections per minute to well over 10k connections per minute.

We also leverage the Global WAF features that Kemp offers.

We run these LoadMasters in an HA environment, to better allow for failovers and increased uptime. We use to balance HTTP/HTTPS traffic on the public internet for public sites, some with near 0k connections per minute. We also use to balance internal IT services such as LDAP, LDAPS, and DNS through various VIPs. 

Kemp has greatly improved our uptime, reduced time we spend on maintenance, and increased the reliability/trust we have in our load balancing system.

We had issues with the network architecture that was needed with our previous balancing system, and we found that we could run a much simpler network setup with the Kemp HA pair.

We can now avoid scheduled downtimes for infrastructure events, through the use of Kemp's HA setup and multiple real servers behind each VIP.

HA failovers are seamless and have allowed for a huge improvement in agility and flexibility in our environment. 

We leverage HTTP/HTTPS  load balancing, WAF, and DNS load balancing the most. We have found Kemp to be the most reliable for these services and have not had any issues at all.

The Global WAF has saved us more than one time from unwanted traffic.

HTTPS/HTTP balancing has been smooth and Kemp handles extremely high traffic loads with ease. We really also like the ability to do LDAP/LDAPS balancing for our internal customers.  This allows for a more smooth experience for our end users and for our internal applications.  

The one area that really could be improved upon is the GUI. Over the last several major versions, the GUI has remained virtually unchanged and still seems lacking. Since there is no "save" or "confirm" button, it is very easy to accidentally make a change on a live, production VIP, or endpoint.

Adding some sort of saving or confirming mechanism in the GUI would be nice and would make it seem more modern. This is not a show stopper for us, but really just a "nice to have". 

Overall, there is little that needs to be improved with this product. 

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for six years.

They are very stable and reliable. We have had no issues at all over the last six years.

This product is very easy to scale up and grow. If in an HA pair, it can be done without downtime.

Support is a ten out of ten. They are quick to answer and very knowledgeable from the start.  They are far better than other IT vendors I have worked with.

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 are using Kemp as a reverse proxy for Microsoft Exchange. We are also using the product for load-balancing internal services.

The Kemp virtual appliance is installed in the DMZ and forwards the traffic to the internal servers. We configured the Edge Security Pack (ESP) so that the virtual appliance captures the credentials of the user, validates those against the authentication services, and then lets the user pass through.

Using this solution, it doesn't publish Exchange servers directly over the internet, thus providing security.

Having a reverse proxy is a secure way to protect access to inside services like Microsoft Exchange. With the ESP configured, we feel that the services are more protected from external threats. There's a lot of attacks possible on Exchange and we needed a solution that would prevent direct access to the web interfaces.

Having the virtual appliance sitting between the internet and the real servers, it intercepts the requests, process them, and can block unwanted requests with the Web Application Firewall.

The most valuable feature is the reverse proxy with ESP since it protects forms and provides authentication of web services. 

When you configure the listening services, you can implement a lot of security features like the Edge Security Pack that intercepts the requests and processes those before they are sent to the real servers.

There's an integrated Web Application Firewall module that you can activate to protect your online services. The module has an auto-update feature, where Kemp pushes the latest rules automatically to protect you against new threats.

The configuration of basic services is pretty straightforward but when you want to configure more advanced settings like the Edge Security Pack feature, it can be somewhat challenging! Even with the documentation, I had to contact the support to get help set this up properly. I think there should be more visual instructions on how to configure advanced features.

Support-wise, I've nothing to complain about. The support technicians are knowledgeable and were able to quickly help me set up and get things working.

The logging feature is somewhat archaic, as you have to go through text files. I think they should implement something more user-friendly for logging.

We've been using Kemp for several years. We used the physical appliances for about five years and we recently switched to the virtual.

We've been using the product for several years and it never crashed.

This product is pretty scalable with the virtual appliance.

Great support, fast and really professional.

Kemp was the first solution we used as a reverse proxy.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We implemented in-house with help of Kemp support.

Nowadays, going with the virtual appliance is the easiest way and the cost is reasonable.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing Kemp. Instead, we looked at product reviews before purchasing.

I used it as a front end to an RDS Farm. Its load-balancing port 80 and port 443 to multiple RDS Gateways. It's deployed as a virtual appliance on an on-prem virtual machine hosted on the Hyper-V server. Kemp LoadMaster is used by more than 1,000 internal users on a daily bases to access the application system at the back end. It's not exposed to the internet, it's used only from internal users inside the corporate LAN. We have daily VM backups setup as well as application backups from inside KEMP.

We used to have DNS round-robin based load balancing from some small applications but it was not highly available and if one instance were to do down half of the traffic would go down. We have tested the build it Microsoft Load balancer, but it was free and it was not reliable. Currently, we are using ZEN NLB for a few small applications that do not require many features but when it came to having a proper NLB for 1000 users the ZEN NLB could not handle the load. We have tested F5 and Kemp and Kemp were much cheaper and easier to setup.

I like that this is a Network Load Balancer that can be used practically with any application in the backend. They have how-to guides on how to set up Kemp NLB with Exchange, but you can use it as well for Sharepoint, RDS, or any other back end server. I like that the interface is intuitive, you have the option to load an SSL certificate on it so then the traffic can be inspected there, this is especially important when you have an Exchange server or RD Gateway at the back that heavily uses SSL Certificates. It has an option to be HA so if you need you can set up two of them to be up and running at the same time in Active-Active fashion. 

The product is really good as-is out of the box. If there is one thing I would change is to have the license file not be coupled with the MAC address of the device. This is actually not really useful in a virtual environment where if you have a single VM with KEMP LoadMaster and you have not set up static MAC Address, if you, for example, recreate the VM and just load the disk file on a new VM it will get new MAC address and the NLB will not work as it will not see a proper license. You need to call their support, explain what the issue is, and then they will generate a new license that you can apply. If this is a production environment and you just had an outage and quickly required the VM then you are extending the outage by the time it will take to get their support to help with the new license.

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

It's rock-solid and very stable.

It can scale easily, I believe you only need to load a new license.

Technical support is nice, they will help you over the phone/email but I had few questions about the design and even professional services were not purchased their support engineer did a screen sharing session to take a look on the configuration to make sure it's following their best practices for the use case we were using it for.

I have used ZEN NLB and Microsoft NLB.

It was easy to get in touch with their sales and get it ordered.

I have implemented it myself.

KEMP NLB is on the cheaper side of the spectrum but works great. If your license expires it will still run just you won't be able to do any changes.

Yes, F5.

Its a nice and easy NLB to set up and operate on a day to day basis. I highly recommend it. 

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!

We have several customers for different services. We have built services on private cloud libraries. We load Java and Python. A lot of these applications interact at multiple data points. For that, we use software load balancers. 

It has been functional. We don't have any outages. 

When we go serverless, we may again have to revisit this because the configuration needs to be changed. With this change, we can run into a lot of other configurations that we haven't got into, which involve additional expenses. It would be challenging to convince management to buy at that price point. It would be a balancing act of justifying that expense and the value, that is, how it is going to save a bit of time and make our platform secure.

It can have better configuration ability. A lot of iterations happen when we have multiple servers pointing to the same domain. If we do not orchestrate carefully, it gets into a loop, which takes away the precious time of the user who is trying to subscribe to a service. It takes a little longer time to realize services as well as web pages.

I have been using this solution for the past four months.

It is stable. We don't have any outages.

It is scalable. It is a load balancer. We have around 2 lakh customers who are using our systems. Every single login has to go through these load balancers.

In terms of our plans to increase its usage, we are thinking of implementing our solution across the cloud. Therefore, when we go serverless, we may need a lot of cloud balancers. We will have to move to a virtual cloud balancer, which is altogether a multi-cloud. We want to take it across multiple geographic locations, which would be huge work.

They are excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

The initial setup was easy. We took it into production after two days, and it took less than 30 minutes.

We implemented it ourselves, but consultants gave us all the information and required knowledge about how to verify. We spent two days doing a hands-on exercise in our staging area, and we were able to understand the entire software ergonomics. After we understood and played around, we finally did some hackathon. We finally concluded that the build is safe and secure, so we posted it. After that, we decided to post it to production. It took less than 30 minutes. We have three DevOps. Our overall software development team has around 20 people.

Currently, no cost is involved with a virtual load balancer. They have used open source. We did not pay for software. We paid for the expertise. We are only paying the consulting charges, which are very reasonable, that is, around a thousand dollars.

The load balancer that we're using right now is for having a tougher load balance between all the services. Very soon, we are looking forward to rolling out a serverless platform on Azure so that we remove the dependency on DevOps configurations and having this container management hub. We will move to a virtual load balancer. They have offered us a pretty competitive price. We are not using all the capabilities. We are only using a subset. We are in touch with their team, and they are very collaborative.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. If they're looking out for a load balancer for a cloud or on-premises deployment, Kemp LoadMaster definitely works.

I would rate Kemp LoadMaster a nine out of ten. It is hard to find a thing to complain about.

We acquired Kemp LoadMaster initially to balance our Exchange multi-site environment. We configured it and now balance the Autodiscover, OWA, and mail services for our three Exchange services in three different sites. Everything flows and works without issues.

As time went on, we added other services such as RDP connections, online banking, and other applications to the LM to balance the load, which made our operations even more efficient.

The implementation of the LoadMaster has created internal and operational efficiencies. It allows us to balance several applications all at once with an easy-to-setup and use application.

The security features, load balancing, built-in templates, and the easy to implement virtual IPs are great. It allows us to accomplish our goals with one application.

In the next release, Kemp should include the ability for LoadMaster to create different DNS record types.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about three years.

The product is very stable. I have had no issues. 

Every experience I have had with the technical support team has been great. I've worked with about four different engineers and they have all given consistent good service. 

This was the first solution of this type.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as there are many built-in templates. Even though I had the assistance of the support team to ensure everything was good, it was a breeze.

The deployment was done by our in-house team.

This is a cost-efficient product.

I didn't really evaluate other options. In my research, I saw great recommendations for the product to balance exchange, so I tested it and it worked well.

It's a great product to use if you need to balance multiple sites and applications. It is easy to set up, the support engineers are top-notch, and it is cost-efficient as well.

Kemp LoadMaster is used in our server for load balancing. Our organization produces software for public sectors like Transport, Healthcare, and Banking system. For continuous service and support, we need to run our system with high availability and avoid failures. Thus, the Kemp LoadMaster helps us to give continuous service to reach and is accessed by our clients.

Kemp LoadMaster is the easiest server maintenance application that gives you a high-performance virtual Load Balancer and a Reverse Proxy. It helps to enable the firewall to secure all servers, including setting up virtual IPs.

This product has good network management for command-based operating systems like Linux.

Managing and maintaining multiple servers is done in a single place.

Most of the networking commands are accessible with the UI, including complete tasks such as closing or opening ports. This makes it simple and clean.

Major roll-on load-balancing with multiple servers and a security layer with VIP gives more security for our servers.

Have a better UI can attract more customers.

Multiple SSL uploads for a single VIP can be added in the future.

Prices on their maintenance plans should be reduced, as it would be better for the users.

It doesn't run well in Hyper-V or at least, it didn't when I bought it. I really don't like the way the logs are presented in the software. A lot of the information in the logs is only meaningful to the Kemp Support Team.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for more than two years.

The technical support is really great and they respond quickly. The people at Kemp were very kind and I got always a proper response. I really want to thank my technician for taking care of my issue, as well as the quick replies.

As for now, things are good and I give lots of thanks to the support team.

We did not use another similar solution. There is no alternative advice; we heard that Kemp is the best load-balancer.

The setup cost and pricing plan is reasonable and will ultimately give you a worthy return.

We have evaluated NGINX, but because of the great support, we have decided on Kemp LoadMaster.

I need to work on the Kemp cloud-based product, as I don't have experience with it.