Loadbalancer.org Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for the web application firewall. We have a Metaswitch system for our telephone service. We're front our SIP provisioning servers and our client communications portals with the WAF.

Loadbalancer.org together with Metaswitch in Enfield, England wrote a set of rules that are being managed on the Loadbalancer to prevent illegal entry, password hacking attempts, invalid SIP provisioning hacking attempts, or just general denial of service attacks into our cloud. It ensures that only what we expect to hit our systems is let through.

The solution has improved our organization by providing the security required to block break-in attempts easily and without overloading the WAF or getting to our servers.

The features I find valuable in this solution are the ease of managing the logs on the WAFs, the ease to identify break-in attempts into the network, writing rules to block them for files or config pull attempts, and the addition of HAProxy to control what is allowed and what is not.

The solution can be improved with the development of a SIP engine because it is difficult to manage SBCs. All SBCs are really tough to write rules for. If we could put this in front of an SBC to have the right rules to possibly block the traffic, that would be very helpful.

The solution can also improve the relationship between Loadbalancer.org and Metaswitch, or now, Microsoft because Metaswitch was purchased by Microsoft. They both position themselves as certified but don't always talk to each other. I wish there would be closer integration between the solution and the vendors when either release new upgrades to their product line. Often we find issues on either end post upgrades.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable. We have not had an issue with stability in over three years. Since it is an n+1 solution fail overs are seamless.

The tech support is good. For the most part, they are able to respond to my issues immediately. In some cases, you may get the runaround because in addition to having their primary support based in England they also have an office in Canada and Asia. You can run into an issue when one engineer passes the case over to another engineer after their shift and they don't know what the first engineer worked on up to that point. It is nice to know that someone is available, but they are not always the right engineer.

Positive

Prior to the solution, the only thing we had was a Juniper SRX240 firewall which is basically just a dumb device for NATing, either that lets you through or it doesn't. A lot of the traffic made it through to our backend, causing server crashes and attacks on the data center.

The initial setup was one of the easiest appliances I've ever installed in the network. It took two weeks to get the solution completely up and running and configured. The solution has monitor mode where you install it, you put it in route, but you don't turn it on, just let it run and watch the logs. You can write your rules based on what those logs are, and then slowly start turning it on for certain events.

The implementation was done in-house with the assistance of the solution's support over the phone.

The solution has allowed our business to almost double year over year in the voice-over IP area because it greatly helps with our customer retention. It blocks what should not make it to our back end servers and allowing only the needed customer traffic. It provides great security rules for hacking attempts.

The solution requires an annual support license that includes software upgrades and support. Compared to other devices in our network, the solution is quite affordable.

We looked at several other firewalls with supposed WAF functionality in them, but they all wanted you to write your own Microsoft/Metaswitch rules. 

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

Our organization purchased the enterprise R20 set up and we are currently using version 8.4.3. of the solution.

We have two telephone switches, one in New York and one in LA, the Loadbalancer.org devices in the Enterprise R2 solution are on Dell N240s in our data centers.

The other feature that I like about the solution is the graphing for network bandwidth and system load averages that are right on your front screen. You can see when somebody's attacking you. Throw that picture up on a screen in your NOC, and then you can see how your domains are doing. When there's a sudden spike from normal traffic, say five megabytes, and now all of a sudden it hits 50 megabytes, you know there's something going on. Look at the WAF logs.

Regarding stability, the box has been up for three years. They are deployed in an N+1. We had a router crash, on the underlying router of the network. We had an instance where the default router crashed and it was brought back up and the Loadbalancer itself did a switchover to the other device and became active. It was stable for over a year after that. Overall the solution is very stable, with no crash problems.

We're not running a huge load through it. For example, our system load of the N240 box is probably less than 2%. It's not pushing a lot. The amount of traffic we are pulling through is maybe at peak times for SIP provisioning servers for phones, maybe 10 megabytes. We run roughly 20,000 phone lines and customer portals through the WAF. It's not a heavy load, but they've been very consistent, with no crashes, and good support. I find their support contracts in this industry reasonable.

When you purchase this solution you get the extra firewall, you get the HAProxy control, you get the WAF rules, and you get a Loadbalancer functionality if you ever need it.

The solution requires on average one person for one hour a day to maintain.

I recommend learning how to write your own rules to match your deployment after starting with the standard delivered set. Customization is easy! Know what is good on your system and what's bad on your own system when you see these Internet requests coming in. For an enterprise, you could use this device to lock down any unwanted entry to your network to make yourself truly private. If you know the IP addresses of your sites, you can tell this device, "Don't let anything else through."  Have some dedicated personnel monitoring it at first for two to three weeks in order to get the rules correct, the way you want to improve, or control your network traffic. Then turn on the blocking. After that, do your daily monitoring for about an hour a day to see if anything needs to be modified.

It has different models doing different things. One is basic load balancing. The other is doing a web application firewall. Another use case is for handling VPN exposure resources. There is one doing advanced DNS sharing as well.

F5 is a balancer that is one of the first to do this kind of thing, so it's pretty much a Swiss Army knife for managing all the load balancing techniques. It's pretty much complete in terms of the offering.

I can’t think of any new features the solution really needs.

The solution can be a bit pricey.

The solution is designed more toward larger organizations and, therefore would be a bit expensive for smaller companies.

I’ve been using the solution for more than a decade.

The solution is pretty stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It’s reliable.

The solution is scalable.

In terms of users, the only limit is that the solution is already a bit expanded. It is mostly for big companies that have budgets to afford it. However, you can also find a few small companies with VM solutions or maybe smaller appliances.

We work a lot with F5 technical support. They are pretty good in general.

I'm not an IT expert. I'm just a research analyst. That said, the initial setup is pretty much straightforward. It doesn't require any specific skillsets. You just need basic knowledge. That would be enough to set up the appliance.

To deploy it pretty much depends on the environment, and that's a jungle there. Everybody has their own idea of what they want to do with it. Basically, you’re applying the load balancer, and it's pretty straightforward. The load balancing strategy will depend on the use case, so it's not something that you can prepare in advance as each organization is a bit different.

Maintenance is another story. If the people using it know the product, they can do both (deploy and maintain). However, you can also have separate teams doing each piece.

I’m an integrator and reseller. I work with F5 partners. F5 has regional partners around the world. These are partners with, I don't know, diamond status, for example.

We do the implementation.

I don’t have any visibility of the ROI a company might be able to achieve.

I have a rough idea of the cost. However, I don’t generally handle licensing details. I’m not sure, for example, if support is included or an extra cost.

I’d rate it a four out of five in terms of affordability, with five being the most expensive.

Basically, I'm a consultant, so I implement things. I don't use them personally. However, I do implement for customers. I work with people that are F5 partners.

I’m currently using the F5 version. The current new version is 16 dot something.

I work primarily on-premises as these are still appliances, VMware physical appliances. VMware is mostly on-prem.

I’d rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I work for a value-added reseller.

Loadbalancer.org is used when an application has multiple instances. 

There are also cases where you have a production and a disaster recovery scenario, and the customer wants the users to be able to switch from the production servers to the disaster recovery servers with as little downtime as possible.

The performance is good.

I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly.

We have been selling Loadbalancer.org for four or five years.

We provide both Cloud and on-premise versions. It was mostly on-premises at first, then, more recently, there have been cloud options.

Loadbalancer.org has been stable for the most part. Whenever there are issues, they are able to check and resolve, check the logs and understand what's going on, resolve or escalate to the OEM, and possibly require a bug fix.

Loadbalancer.org is a scalable solution.

Here in Nigeria, where I am currently in, it is scalable, but there are times when cost considerations must be made. That is something that has an effect on scalability for us. The customer wants to expand and do more, but the cost is very high. They may not be able to scale as much as they would like to.

We have four clients who use this solution.

Technical support is okay. It could always be better, but I have not had any major issues with this solution.

We are in the partner space, and not the end user space. We are partners with Citrix and VMware, and we use their products for application virtualization and load balancers.

Obviously, you need to be skilled. It's quick, and straightforward if you're skilled and knowledgeable about the solution. If you lack the necessary knowledge, hire someone from the OEM space or another consultant with expertise in that solution to assist you in implementing it.

The time it takes to deploy is determined by the customer's scope and scenario. Sometimes the surroundings are straightforward, and other times it's a little more complicated, but it could be anywhere from four to twelve weeks.

Licensing fees are paid annually.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution when publishing Windows based applications and other custom based SQL applications. We are in the progress of migrating the on-premises data center to the cloud and continue to use Loadbalancer for this.

Loadbalancer has improved our organization. When we enable load balance between the two servers and we experience an issue in trying to connect to a specific URL, we can reduce the impact using this solution. One of the servers will be supporting the users so there will be no downtime and no impact on productivity. This is one of the main reasons that we use Loadbalancer.

The connection that this solution helps our servers maintain has been most useful. 

The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging. 

I have been using Loadbalancer for six years.

This is a stable product. When we experience bottlenecks, they provide vulnerable mitigation support and patches.

This is a scalable solution. 

We receive technical support from a vendor if it is under their scope. If the person in our team has some more experience, they can easily troubleshoot the issue. I would rate this technical support a four and a half out of five. 

The initial setup is complex. First you need the SSL certificate for the URL. Once you have obtained this, you have to install a scaler before starting to configure your Loadbalancer. It will take around one or two hours.

This solution was implemented in-house. 

This solutions costs $5 per user per month. Web also needed to pay for a platform license that cost 26,000 Indian rupees.

I would definitely recommend this solution. It's highly scalable.

There are different scenarios provided to suit different customers. If it's a small environment, there is a box card virtual plan that allows up to 2000 concurrent users to load balance. If the load is high, there is the option of a physical box and physical scaler. If there's a higher load, one can opt for SDX that works as a cluster.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Loadbalancer.org to check Nova Network and also use it for F5. We use its load-balancing technology.

I found scalability in Loadbalancer.org valuable.

An area for improvement in Loadbalancer.org is that sometimes it works fine, but sometimes, it has issues. The setup for Loadbalancer.org is also complex, so that's another area for improvement.

I've been using Loadbalancer.org for thirty years.

Loadbalancer.org is a stable solution.

Loadbalancer.org is a scalable solution.

I haven't contacted the technical support team of Loadbalancer.org because it isn't necessary at the moment.

Loadbalancer.org has a complex setup. The time it takes to deploy depends on different technologies and the deployment teams. For example, it can take one day to deploy for some groups, while it could take two months for some. In my company, it took two months. Deployment time for Loadbalancer.org also depends on the competency of the deployment team and knowledge of load balancing.

The costs associated with Loadbalancer.org depends on the technology. For some, we need to pay, but others are open, so they're free.

The number of people using Loadbalancer.org depends on the company. One client has ten to one hundred users, while another has up to one million users.

There's a plan to increase the number of users for Loadbalancer.org, but that depends on the company.

Between one to ten managers, admins, and engineers take care of the deployment and maintenance of Loadbalancer.org, but it depends on the company.

I'd recommend Loadbalancer.org to anyone who wants to start using it.

My rating for Loadbalancer.org is eight out of ten.

In our experience, Loadbalancer.org is best suited for small businesses looking to balance their website. They don't require HA, DR, or anything else.

Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix. In some cases, our customers do not have an engineer on staff who can support this device.

These customers have a large number of Linux engineers but don't have the money. We suggested using Loadbalancer.org and other open-source tools. Many customers are of different sizes and have different budgets.

Loadbalancer.org has everything that is needed.

The price could be reduced. 

Loadbalancer.org's complexity could be reduced.

I last used Loadbalancer.org three years ago, but I deploy this solution for our clients.

I am also working with F5, Kemp, Barracuda, Cisco, and NGINX.

The last time that I used Barracuda was three to five years ago.

We used F5 Big-IP with some customers and deployed it to others.

It is easy to deploy Loadbalancer.org.

Loadbalancer.org is an open-source solution, with additional costs, however, in some cases, the price remains the same. It is dependent on the customer and what discounts F5 has given.

Loadbalancer.org is based on open-source products, but it requires money for support and other activities.

I would recommend this solution for small businesses with limited resources and do not have complicated requirements.

I would rate Loadbalancer.org an eight out of ten.

We use Loadbalancer for balancing loads in our main application.

Loadbalancer is easy to use. It performs well, with low latency. 

I would like it if Loadbalancer had the ability to make rules for specific shared bots.

I've been using Loadbalancer for about two years.

For us, for the company, this is stable. 

You can scale up the core license at any time. It's not a big issue. You just add the license. And if we want to upgrade, we can install a new appliance or a new version then take the backup from the old one and deploy it to the new one. Currently, Loadbalancer is handling up to 10,000 decisions each day.

I recommend paying for a support license. I opened one ticket because one service wasn't working. After that, we ran some diagnostics and determined that we needed to upgrade something, then we integrated everything on our side. We only had one case in a year, so Loadbalancer is good.

We pay a monthly subscription for Loadbalancer.

I rate Loadbalancer.org seven out of 10. I would recommend Loadbalancer for some companies. It depends on the management. It needs to be a good fit for your business requirements. 

Loadbalancer.org is used in a bank. All the traffic we forward to the QA are being redirected to Loadbalancer.org. There are additional load balancers created through Microsoft Azure and the traffic is being forwarded there as an additional layer to Loadbalancer.org where we are only using IP addresses and reports.

The interface from Loadbalancer.org should be improved.

I have been using Loadbalancer.org for a couple of months.

Loadbalancer.org is stable.

The scalability of Loadbalancer.org has been fine since I have been using it.

We have approximately 10 IT staff utilizing this solution.

The support we have received from Loadbalancer.org has been good.

I rate the support from Loadbalancer.org a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Loadbalancer.org is simple.

We used a consultant for the implementation.

We have approximately three engineers that do the maintenance of this solution.

I would recommend others to focus on the network and learn how the solution works fully and they should understand the concepts behind it.

I rate Loadbalancer.org an eight out of ten.