Loadbalancer.org Reviews

Web filtering and load balancing.

They balance a lot better than the last set that we had. The previous load balancers made some bad decisions with allocating the load, and they would basically overload one of the single nodes behind. These, from loadbalancer.org, tend to balance it on a much better basis. The two factors, or the two features, you want in a load balancer, mostly, are high-availability and balancing the load. The last ones and these ones are both high-availability, but these ones balance a lot better than the last ones did.

The most important feature is the fact it was recommended by the supplier. The previous load balancers weren't a very good match for what we were trying to do.

They work. It just keeps going. The vendor will set them up, and they've just been trouble-free. They've just worked. They just keep going. That's what the principal purpose of the load balancer is, to work around and be available when there's any outages with the cluster behind. They just keep going, which is exactly what we want them for.

They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers, whereas the previous ones were.

In terms of balancing other traffic, that they don't already balance, that would be a useful thing. I actually logged a call with their support, because I needed to try and work out how we were going to do it. That's when they came back and told me, "No, we don't actually do that." But it's something they're planning to do in the future.

They've been rock solid. They're stable, we definitely use them within their capabilities. They are very good on that.

No issues with scalability, not at all. They are very capable. We only use a tiny fraction of what they're capable of doing. 

It's absolutely outstanding. They have a web chat feature, which I've used a number of times. And they've always been very responsive and very knowledgeable. They've sorted things out on the spot.

We did have a previous solution. We switched because of the supplier's recommendation, which we don't regret. Not at all. These are much better. The other ones weren't doing the job very well.

The "original, original" setup was very complex, and in the it end didn't work. We run a Smoothwall cluster behind the load balancers, which is for web filtering. The original design that was implemented didn't work the way that it was meant to, because of interactions with the firewall. We did things differently to the way they normally do things, and that actually broke their design. 

So we basically had to roll it back to a simplified setup. But that wasn't any fault of the load balancer, or any fault of the Smoothwall. It's just the way that the whole project was done. We didn't tell them exactly what we wanted, and they went on what they thought it was going to be, and that just didn't match.

So the setup is notably complex. We did need their support for the original setup as well.

In terms of saving money, they haven't really made a difference to our operating costs. It's not a cost-saving device.

I have no idea, because I don't have anything to do with pricing. It was basically, "We need these, we need these," and then that's what happened. We got them. I had nothing to do with the negotiation on the price.

Basically you've got load balancers in the front and then you've got a number of machines that sit behind it that actually do the work. The load balancers just allocate out the work. So the people that manage the system behind the load balancers, this is their preferred solution. They managed to get us them for a very good price.

We had load balancers from before, that were just kicking around, so we used the ones that we had before, and they weren't a very good match. Then the supplier said, "Use these instead," and that's what we did. They were afforded somehow, (I have no idea how that money was found, or how much they cost or anything like that). But we switched over to what they said and haven't looked back.

Plan your specifications and features carefully. It's about doing proper planning to make sure that they will actually fit your requirements.

The owner of the company writes a very extensive and detailed blog. I would suggest any other potential customers read it, that they read the owner's blog, to understand what the company is focused on and where their priorities lie. Beyond just the product marketing and materials, you can actually see where the owner of the company wants them to be going, and what they're doing. And that might help focus you on whether it's the right product for what you're trying to achieve.

Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is scalable and easily managed. The solution's analytics is also very good.

Compared to the physical products, the solution's throughput is a little less.

I have been using the solution for two years.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

The solution is highly scalable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

We previously used an inbuilt load balancer.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution’s deployment doesn’t take too long.

You need to have a basic knowledge of load balancers to use the solution. You can deploy the solution on-premises or on the cloud. Analytics-wise, the solution is much better compared to other vendors.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Load balance http and https requests, our customer service.

It has relieved the load on our team so we can focus on other aspects of the operation.

When we do load balancing, the customer does not know that this particular node is down because the load balancing hides it from them. So, from a customer point of view, they have what I would call an unbreakable service. The service is continuous. Now, on our end, because of the load balancer, we can actually hide it from them, move to another server and bring the bad server offline. So it does improve our SLA with the customer.

Ease of use and support.

The user interface precludes need to be well versed with Linux IPVS command line. This make it easy for junior team members to participate in managing load balancing needs. 

The support especially helps us with quick remote fixes. With a remote fix, I can view the fix in real time and yet ease security concerns for my supervisor. We had a few issues and they responded immediately. They came in remotely and fixed them. Everything is really good from the customer service point of view, which is what we expected it to be.

It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, to somehow extract the data and chart it for this appliance, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service.

Right now, there's no way for us to extract the data. So from that point of view, we can see it on the user interface but we cannot extract out the chart or the data.

No issues with stability. There were a few issues in the past, probably due to configurations. The support guy came in remotely and helped us to fix it. It's stable, it's in production nonstop.

So far no issues with scalability. It was easy to upgrade the license for unlimited clusters and servers.

When we bought the product, we got a lower tier version that had a limitation on the clusters. Then we upgraded to unlimited clusters due to our needs and it has been good. We have not made the limit of the unlimited clusters yet.

Super. They are good. They know what they are doing. They're responsive.

I used Linux IPVS in a previous job. It is not user friendly. It required much more hands-on knowledge. You need your command line, you need to fix things. With the Loadbalancer.org solution, on top of the command line they have a fancy GUI that makes it more user-friendly.

Straightforward. It's just a hardware setup. You just click on a few buttons in the GUI and everything is fine.

I really don't know for sure, as we previously used Round Robin DNS. I think it is likely immeasurable, as the business revenue depends a lot on the load balancer. We cannot live without it.

You can start with the base appliance R20 first and upgrade to the MAX version if necessary.

Their pricing is good. We are looking at it from a customer point of view. Customer downtime costs us money. So the pricing is is fair. They have good service and I recommend the company.

KEMP LoadMaster.

Implement major changes during the appropriate support hours so you can get support if things don't work out correctly.

Start out with the limited, restricted option first. Because to upgrade to the unlimited option, you just call customer service and get your license changed. That would help some small businesses. So if they evaluate, and they find that they need more, they just update their license and they get unlimited clusters. So that way they are saving, if they want to be cautious.

We are using this solution for internet management. We have approximately eight incoming ISP lines. All of the ISP lines go to the load balancer.

We use it for normal internet access.

It doesn't have the bonding capability feature.

I would like to see the bonding capability feature included and it should be easier to upgrade. The capacity that we currently have is 2G. 

If we could upgrade it using the same device, we could upgrade it twice without changing the hardware, that would be easier for us.

It should be scalable without changing the hardware.

We have been using this solution for approximately six years.

We are using the same version that we have been using for the last six years.

For now, it's stable.

Currently, it is not scalable. We have already reached our limit.

We were supposed to increase our capacity to four gigs, but now we are one gig. To upgrade, we would have to go with all new hardware.

We have approximately 2,000 users in our organization.

So far, we have not had any problems.

Previously, we did not use another solution. Loadbalancer.org is the only one that I have used.

The installation was completed through our vendors.

The installation was easy, not very difficult. It is easy to install.

We are planning to change to another load balancer with the bonding capability feature. 

I would recommend this solution to others, but it would be better if it had the bonding capability.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Load balancing Exchange, print servers, our call desk software, and SharePoint.

It means that if one of our mail-servers falls over, it's a much more seamless process. Or if we need to do maintenance on one of them, we can take it out of the Loadbalancer in a controlled fashion so that users don't notice that there's been a problem, or that maintenance is going on. They continue business as usual. It's made end-users' experience much better.

• Reliability 
• High availability

At the moment, I can't think of anything. For what we use it for, it does everything we need it to. It does it well and it doesn't have any trouble, so I can't think of anything that I would change. 

No issues with stability. The only time we ever take it offline is when we do firmware upgrades on it, but that's in a controlled fashion. In seven years, we've not had any unexpected downtime at all.

When you do a manual failover, no one seems to notice it. It's a seamless thing, which obviously helps.

We have about 30,000 connections going through at any one time and it's fine, it doesn't seem to sweat. It doesn't get overloaded.

With this company, it's the best that I've experienced. They actually phone you back.

This is the first one that we bought, and it's the one we stuck with.

It's not complex. They provide very helpful guides on their websites for the things that we load-balance. We just followed the guides which were accurate and easy to follow. They're pretty good from that perspective.

While it's increased our uptime, we don't really justify cost as time - if that makes sense - so it's difficult to quantify.

We've got an unlimited license, which doesn't costs that much compared to other vendors, and we don't have to buy it again. The other thing they did was they gave us a free virtual appliance, so we paid for two and got three.

Buy what you need, or a little bit more than you need. Like I said, we've not had any trouble with them, we've bought the unlimited appliance and we're just using it, and we've not hit any limits.

We evaluated a couple of others and then decided to go with Loadbalancer. We evaluated KEMP, Zen, and F5.

I would say, go for it. It has proved to be a pretty reliable system, it hasn't let us down. Try to break it.

We've never had any trouble with it. And when I've had to speak to support about firmware upgrades and things like that, they either do it for you or they give you guides and it just works. It's probably few and far between, with regards to things that actually do what it says on the tin. There's a lot of stuff out there at the moment that says it does everything but it doesn't. This is one of the few that actually does it.

We provide a web-filtering system for 200 schools, and Loadbalancer.org makes sure that it balances across all of the web-filtering service that we've got, to provide good quality service.

It was part of a project that we did where we used to outsource all of the web-filtering to a third party. We weren't very happy with it. We wanted to bring everything in-house, control the system ourselves. This is an absolute key component to being able to allow us to do that. It's enabled us to have much better service to offer at a cheaper price, and much more resilient.

Most important for us that it makes sure that the load is distributed and that we always have access to the end-servers that they're connected to. We need that to make sure that we have a consistent, high level of service that the schools can rely on.

We've had a couple of minor issues in the two years they've been running, a couple of very small glitches. 

No we haven't had any scalability issues. We've installed them, installed the devices from day one, and they've worked absolutely fine.

In those cases where we had small glitches, whenever we contacted the support team, they've been absolutely fantastic.

We weren't really using anything ourselves because we were doing it through a third-party contract previously, but we switched to Loadbalancer.org at the recommendation of our web-filtering partners.

It was actually our partner who set them up for us, so we didn't have anything to do with it directly. But in our case, yes, it was straightforward.

The appliances have had a measurable effect on our operating costs. I wouldn't be able to put a finger on it as such, but yes, they've definitely helped.

I'd say it is very good value.

To be honest, our filtering partners said that they had done that work previously themselves, they had tried and tested, and they recommended Loadbalancer.org. So we just went with their recommendation. We, ourselves, didn't evaluate anything else, but I know that they have. They'd be in a much better place than us to do those evaluations.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We have had one or two small crashes on them, nothing major, but I guess that would be the only thing stopping it from being a 10.

I would say that, from the experience that we've had, the devices, operation, and the support from the technical support teams, that I can't fault it. I can't fault the systems. I'd happily recommend them.

It's just worked. It's been a good system. We were advised to purchase it and it was good advice. I'd say that it's been absolutely 100% brilliant for us, and I wouldn't think twice about recommending them.

It actually makes our whole network more reliable, because of its load balancing capabilities. And not only load balancing, but also redundancy. That's what we use it for.

We can more easily set up a test environment, because you can easily configure your forms. It makes it more flexible for us to convert our test environment to a production environment, without having to change DNSs on the outside. You just configure the forms on the inside. So without changing the actual endpoint for the end user, we can create completely different networks in the background. So that's really flexible for us.

First of all it's the reliability, what you create by load balancing, because you have more endpoints. That's for our web services that we provide. This is the only feature for us, and it's important because it makes our network more reliable.

We are only using the basic features, and for us it's good. We're not yet using the SSL certificate offloading because we are still using an older software version. But I already know that in the new versions they have, it's built in. That would be a feature that I would like. But that's already there in the newer versions. As I said, we're still using an older one and it still works fine for us. 

No issues with stability. I had some questions, especially at the start, but their great service team was there for us. But no instabilities.

If I'm correct, we have the Enterprise version and it's very scalable. You can make endless endpoints and there are no restrictions in the version we have. So it's very much scalable.

Great, really. I give them a 10 out of 10. Their tech team provides really great support. Very knowledgeable engineers are there for you. They are very responsive and they come with good solutions. Their goal is really to help you, and they know it's one of the cores in your network because it creates the reliability. So that's why it's also one of the key points, that always needs to be working. They're supportive like that. They are very responsive.

We did have a previous solution once, but I don't remember the name because it was more than 10 years ago. We used a software solution on our own hardware, based in a Windows system, and it didn't work at all. After that we immediately decided on a more professional solution and this, Loadbalancer.org, is where we came to and we're still there.

As for our old solution, technically it was not working. The problem with the software solution - not theirs, a different company - the problem was that it worked fine for 100 users but it was not scalable at all. And then if the 110th user came in, the system totally crashed. It was not a good solution. We found out very quickly and, luckily, we found this solution.

It was very straightforward. You just create your virtual servers, you connect it to the physical servers and that's it. For me it was very straightforward. I like the way they think, how they made the interface.

I'm not really thinking of return of investment. For us it was important to make our network redundant and reliable. In that sense, yes there is a ROI, because you cannot run an organization without any redundancy. It needs to be reliable.

It's worth the cost. It's not cheap, but it's a good solution. If you're looking for a good solution, this is  a good solution. Is it cheap? No. Is it worth the money? Yes, I think it is.

Do it. 

I think they have very nice upgrade offers. When you start small, you can take the smaller version, and if your company is hopefully expanding, you can always choose an upgraded version. I remember they had nice offers. We never needed one because we immediately chose the Enterprise version but I can imagine that you would like to start small, and they have nice offers for that.

I would say it's a 10 out of 10, because it does exactly what it needs to do and that's what you want from a product.

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.