F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition Reviews

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to load balance the incoming traffic in our environment. When users want to access our internal infrastructure or web applications located in our internal infrastructure or DMZ environment, their traffic is load balanced into the internal environment. Users arrive from the internet and either land into our DMZ web application, from which we redirect the same application via F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to our internal environment. We are using the LTM edition in our environment for this purpose.

Apart from that, we are also using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as BIG-IP DNS, which was previously known as GTM. We use F5 products for DNS traffic as well. We have two data centers, one on the west side and one on the east side in the Azure environment. BIG-IP DNS edition load balances the traffic into different data centers. In some cases, for disaster recovery scenarios, we use this virtual IP DNS capability. Additionally, we are also using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition with ASM tools and WAF, which provides Web Application Layer 7 firewall capabilities.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers several best features. It is very easy to deploy within fifteen to twenty minutes. We can deploy F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition anywhere, either in an on-premises environment or in the Azure environment. If we want to discard a virtual IP, we can do that easily. We can span as many virtual IPs in a very fast time. If an F5 virtual edition becomes corrupted, we can easily redeploy the same snapshot of that virtual machine into the environment very quickly. It is very scalable and easy to use compared to hardware applications. In comparison with hardware applications, if a failure happens with hardware, we need to replace the hardware, which takes considerable time. However, with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we can redeploy very quickly, within ten minutes.

Scalability with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent in terms of current usage where we have one thousand to two thousand users landing into the DMZ zone who want to access DMZ applications. Sometimes on weekends, holidays, or during peak seasons, if ten thousand, fifty thousand, or even a million people want to access the application simultaneously, we have configured auto-scalability. Automatically, additional F5 virtual machines will deploy, and the increased virtual load will be served by F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. This auto-scalability feature is very useful. If we want to use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for other purposes, such as internal deployment, we can also redeploy the same F5 instance internally.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization with an excellent dashboard that has been very much revamped. The features are refreshed compared to earlier versions, such as version thirteen. Version sixteen has a very clean and easy-to-use dashboard that is very fast compared to our physical F5. The ordering and registration processes are very easy to navigate. We can choose the F5 version very easily. Another very scalable and user-friendly feature is that we can add as many interfaces as needed. In physical F5 systems, the hardcoded interfaces are typically eight or sixteen, and we cannot increase those interfaces. However, with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we can span as many virtual interfaces as required. As per the use case, if it increases, we can increase the interfaces very easily. These capabilities are very useful for our company.

Regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's improvement areas, the current dashboard is very useful, but I believe the registration process should be simplified in the virtual edition. Especially in the Azure environment, many features are not currently aligned and working with Azure. We need to make efforts to ensure it is well integrated with Azure. Currently, if we want to integrate route tables with the virtual F5 edition, we need to deploy scripting inside the virtual F5 instances, and then that script performs the virtual IP route table changes in the Azure environment. This feature should be auto-configured, and efforts are needed to ensure the virtual edition is very much aligned with the Azure environment. I am expecting this improvement in the next edition.

The failover capability is also not as good as it should be. We have tested the failover functionality, and sometimes we have observed that failover fails. F5 does not successfully fail over to other instances perfectly, so that also needs to be improved. Security should also be enhanced, as in the past I have seen some security loopholes. Tightening of security should be included in the new software. These improvements should be present in near future editions.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition specifically for five years.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very much stable. The stability rating is one hundred percent.

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent. Within ten minutes of time, we can scale and boot as many virtual machines as needed in the environment. It is very fast.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very fast. Within logging the ticket, we get the invitation link within fifteen minutes, and support personnel are in the room to help us. The service is very fast and very useful.

I did not previously use any other load balancing solution. The only thing is that earlier we were using physical F5, but currently we are using the virtual edition. I can also remember that earlier we were using NetScaler. Currently, we are not using it because it is not as much improved.

Compared to our physical environment, with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition we have saved approximately one hundred thousand dollars. In terms of employees, earlier we were using ten applications, so we had a team of five people. Currently, we are only a team of two people. We also saved expenses in this area. Overall, I can say the ROI includes a twenty-five to thirty percent cost reduction, with some areas achieving forty percent cost reduction in our expenses.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that the setup cost is not very high, but licensing is very substantial. The licensing is very heavy, and prices are very costly for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I have observed that the real pricing is not fully visible to me because it is handled by my sales team, but the pricing is very high for licensing.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we evaluated F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition with NetScaler and Azure's native solution.

With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I find it easy to configure interfaces and span multiple interfaces, which has saved our time. It also reduces cost because in the physical environment, we need to spend considerable money for sixteen interfaces even if we are using only four interfaces and need to pay the price for all sixteen interfaces. However, with the virtual solution, if we want to use interfaces, we can span four interfaces and need only a very small amount of money. It is time-saving because configuring interfaces requires human interaction. The user experience has also improved as we can configure as many virtual environments as needed, such as DMZ environment, internal environment, and other environments per our use case.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition a nine out of ten. I cannot give a ten out of ten because there should always be improvements needed in the software domain. I cannot rate it as ten out of ten because improvements are always necessary in the software and IT domains. I reduced the number by one for this reason, as there are no other reasons for this rating.

I can advise other organizations or colleagues that if they want to use any scalable, faster, or better stable solution, I usually recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is cost-effective compared to other solutions, such as Azure native solutions. Compared to those alternatives, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a very cost-effective solution, and they can easily redeploy and deploy with significant cost savings. The easy-to-use dashboard and all features make it an excellent choice.

Most of my experience with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been around deploying it in virtualized setups for application load balancing, traffic management, and security use cases, supporting critical systems rather than just testing or labs. I have primarily used it in production and virtual environments.

We have a lot of internally hosted applications for our internal team members across the board, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped us with that. All of these are very big infrastructure, very big environments. We have deployed it as the primary load balancer in front of multiple application servers to distribute traffic evenly, handle SSL offloading to reduce server load, and also to monitor application health and automatically fail over unhealthy instances.

In our environment, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is deployed as a virtual appliance within our virtualization platform. It sat in front of our core web applications and backend services, acting as the primary load balancer and traffic management, especially in the traffic management layer. We have configured it in a HA setup to avoid single points of failure. It handled SSL termination and distributed traffic. From a network perspective, it was placed in a segmented zone between the external facing layer and the internal servers, ensuring controlled and secure traffic flow.

We are using VMware supporting our internal and customer-facing applications for the deployment of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

There are a few features within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that really did stand out in day-to-day production use. SSL offloading has been a big one for us, followed by application health monitoring. Adding to that, overall traffic management features such as intelligent load balancing and session persistence helped keep performance consistent even during peak usage. Together, those features are what really made the platform reliable and production ready for us. SSL offloading, health monitoring, and intelligent traffic management are the most valuable features I have considered. There could be some that have slipped through the cracks, but these are the primary ones which our main focus goes towards.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we had occasional slowdowns and single points of failure. After putting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in place, we saw much better performance and consistency and close to zero downtime.

We have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in production as a virtual load balancer in front of core web applications for SSL offload, which eliminated downtime and improved performance.

There is always scope for improvement. Overall, it is a very strong and reliable platform. Looking at the scope for improvement, the platform is extremely powerful. However, for new engineers, it can take some time to fully understand and use all the features efficiently, especially around advanced traffic policies and customization. New engineers tend to struggle and find their way through it. The licensing and pricing model could also be simpler and more flexible, particularly in virtual and cloud environments where scaling up and down is pretty common. A flexible model could put us in a much better shape. While the interface is functional, some parts of the UI could be more modern and intuitive to make day-to-day management faster. Apart from that, I do not think there is something beyond that which needs to be changed or kept under observation to be improved.

From a documentation standpoint, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is pretty clear on that. Sometimes it can be very dense, but oftentimes it gets the job done. In terms of support, overall it is solid, but response time can vary depending on severity, licensing, and during peak times of the day. That being said, there are more refinement areas rather than major gaps. The core functionality is very strong and versatile.

I have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for close to a couple of years now.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable in my experience.

Before migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, the organization was using different solutions that caused instability issues in our current environment. After moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have seen significantly fewer outages, smoother maintenance, and noticeable performance improvements.

After migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have had fewer outages, very little downtime, and easy maintenance windows. From an availability standpoint, outages dropped very significantly after moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The combination of reliable load balancing, health checks, and failover meant applications stayed online even when individual servers had issues. Overall, as somebody who manages network and servers, I personally had very few friction instances where I had to deal with applications and software services teams. Although they are part of internal operations, I have had a much better experience after migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during maintenance and outage windows. There have been pretty significant benefits for us when we migrated from the previous solution to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been a very solid experience regarding scalability. Because it is a virtual edition, we were able to scale resources such as CPU, memory, and throughput based on our demand without major architectural changes. As application traffic increased, we could adjust capacity or deploy additional instances relatively easily. It has been a pretty good experience so far.

Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition changes from licensing based and other factors. When we have engaged support for critical issues, engineers were knowledgeable and helpful. At times it took us a pretty decent amount of time for us to get hold of an engineer. That being said, everything has its pros and cons.

Neutral

Previously, we were using Citrix NetScaler, and we have had a pretty rough experience with it. That is why we explored options and changed from Citrix NetScaler to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The advice I would give to somebody else looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to invest time upfront in proper design and learning the platform before rolling it into production. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is extremely powerful, but it is not a plug-and-play tool. Understanding the platform before deploying it into production is essential.

I have personally not dealt with pricing and licensing setup for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The other team took care of it. I was solely responsible for deploying and maintaining it internally in the environment. Management took care of the pricing and licensing part.

We have seen enough uptime with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. For us, uptime is what makes us revenue. We have seen less revenue loss or, potentially, we are in a much better shape in front of our customers. That means a lot, and we have gotten enough return on investment so far.

We have done extensive research and gotten some personal opinions from industry professionals before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Some lighter or more basic platforms were easier to set up initially, but then they lacked the stability and the core functionality that we were expecting. They failed our tests. Over time, these limitations showed up as outages, performance bottlenecks, and operational risk. What stood with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it passed all our tests with flying colors and that is ultimately why we have standardized on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We have a lot of internally hosted applications for our internal team members across the board, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped us with that. All of these are very big infrastructure, very big environments. We have deployed it as the primary load balancer in front of multiple application servers to distribute traffic evenly, handle SSL offloading to reduce server load, and also to monitor application health and automatically fail over unhealthy instances. Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we had occasional slowdowns and single points of failure. After putting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in place, we saw much better performance and consistency and close to zero downtime.

After migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have had fewer outages, very little downtime, and easy maintenance windows. From an availability standpoint, outages dropped very significantly after moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The combination of reliable load balancing, health checks, and failover meant applications stayed online even when individual servers had issues. Overall, as somebody who manages network and servers, I personally had very few friction instances where I had to deal with applications and software services teams. Although they are part of internal operations, I have had a much better experience after migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during maintenance and outage windows.

We did not track it down to an exact percentage, but from an operational standpoint, the difference is crystal clear with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Even to date, we still tend to notice the difference. Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were dealing with recurring service interruptions. The list is endless with recurring service interruptions, sometimes multiple incidents in a month, in a week. After moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, those dropped to very rare occurrences. What a new normal used to be, it changed drastically for us and outages are happening once in a blue moon. I would rate this review a seven.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition at the State of Oregon involved migrating from Cisco ACS to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, specifically using their LTM module. Day to day, I handled a lot of services, including load balancing and certificate management. I onboarded customers looking to balance loads between servers using their LTM module, and I also worked extensively with the AFM module, which is a firewall, and the APM module, which is their VPN.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is especially useful for its load balancing capabilities. They excel in round-robin load balancing methods and offer persistence methods that can be beneficial for hosting websites where customers navigate multiple times to fill out forms. For instance, in an application hosted on a server, I could implement a persistence method to maintain session continuity, combined with round-robin methods that optimize performance on the application side.

I also utilized F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for their APM module, which provides a solid VPN solution. They have a user-friendly flow where, for example, I could add a one-time password easily. The remote access VPN capabilities are notable, and I appreciate their AFM module for firewall functionalities. The GUI is very user-friendly, allowing me to create rules and NAT policies with ease.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers, in my experience, include their flow method and APM module. I have used Palo Alto and Cisco products, but I find F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's APM module exceptional for its visual representation of authentication processes. Additionally, I appreciate how clearly F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition handles certificate management, all accessible from one dashboard for easy renewal or creation.

The flow method in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition stands out for its GUI, as I can visually compare different customers without digging into details the way I would have to do in Cisco or Palo Alto. For example, if I want to see differences between customers, in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I can visualize it all in a flow diagram while seeing the features associated with each customer, which simplifies the comparison process significantly.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization at the State of Oregon by streamlining operations. The load balancing module, in particular, was very effective, as it simplified the user experience compared to Cisco's extensive tab system, which made it hard to correlate user authentication. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's customer-centric approach allows me to see individual client configurations without confusion.

I have noticed specific positive outcomes with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, such as significant time savings and a reduction in errors. I have a clearer overview of which features each customer has, which minimizes mistakes during operations and enhances our overall efficiency.

In terms of improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I encountered issues with load management when multiple modules such as AFM, APM, LTM, and GTM are handled together. If one customer has all modules in use, I found that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition struggles with load capacity, leading to problems, particularly with high traffic volumes.

The primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations. While their iRules and LTM modules perform well, handling large traffic volumes remains a challenge, necessitating improvements in their load handling capabilities.

I am not currently using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in my role, but I used to work for the State of Oregon, and I migrated to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which is how I know about this product, having worked on it for approximately five years.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has proven to be stable, although it faced challenges handling high traffic volumes. At times, we experienced difficulties that required close monitoring, especially with traffic loads, but the load balancing module still performed admirably.

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was quite impressive, as it allowed us to onboard many customers efficiently. I particularly appreciated the APM and LTM modules, which facilitated an easier onboarding process for additional customers. However, the primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations.

Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been excellent. We received quality assistance for our inquiries, and I appreciated their forums, which provided comprehensive answers to many questions and architectural queries.

Before adopting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using Cisco solutions. We transitioned to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition after reviewing budgetary concerns and architectural advantages, prompting our move to incorporate load balancing, VPN, and AFM modules into our infrastructure.

We have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. By using multiple integrated modules such as AFM, APM, and LTM in one platform, we avoided the need for separate components, which saved considerable money and space.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been very favorable, especially compared to competitors, as F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's pricing structure was significantly more advantageous and aligned with our budgetary considerations.

In our evaluation process, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition really stood out among competitors. Although we considered other options, we ultimately decided to pursue F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. For firewall solutions, however, we also looked at Palo Alto for potential improvements.

My advice for others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to focus on the LTM and APM modules. As for the AFM module, I would recommend checking if there have been significant improvements over the last five years since I last worked with it. I believe I have provided all the insights and feedback regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that I can. I have rated this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that I used it for LTM, ASM, and GTM modules. I used F5 LTM to load balance customer application traffic, and I used ASM to protect and safeguard customer applications from various cyber threats, attacks, and day-to-day emerging vulnerabilities. We also had DNS and Global Traffic Manager services for multiple client applications, so I have hands-on experience with all these technologies of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition including LTM, GTM, and ASM.

In my previous organization, we had a data center virtualized environment using VMware ESXi hosts. We had bare metal ESXi hosts where we installed VMware vSphere and NSX virtualization software. To perform customer application load balancing and enable application security, we installed F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition VMs, which can protect the application from various cyber attacks and perform seamless application load balancing for traffic sharing between application nodes. We purchased licenses for VMs based on the requirement of LTM, GTM, and various security features and deployed the VMs on VMware vSphere and the VMware NSX environment. I also had work experience deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in public clouds such as GCP and OCI from the marketplace images, enabling seamless network connectivity and performance for customer applications via F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition VMs.

With the specific use case of load balancing and protecting against various threats, I use F5 LTM to perform load balancing for major production applications. One of our customers had only a single application server serving all application traffic of the entire production application and reported a performance issue. Following the management architecture review of the application, they identified the need for enabling load sharing for the application. We suggested implementing F5 LTM load balancer, which could provide load sharing between multiple application nodes. We recommended hosting the application on multiple servers instead of a single server, configured it via F5 LTM, and ultimately load balanced the application traffic for three additional nodes. The client achieved seamless traffic load balancing between the multiple application nodes, and the application performance increased, eliminating the slowness issue. In terms of LTM features, we can offload SSL certificates on LTM, conduct SSL encryption and decryption, and implement numerous traffic redirection rules, multiple LTM policies, and iRules that affect application traffic. Regarding ASM, we have used it to protect client applications from DDoS attacks, major OWASP Top 10 attacks, SQL injection attacks, script injection attacks, and many botnet attacks. For instance, one of our clients experienced a DDoS attack on a major live application, and we enabled ASM policies with DDoS protection, setting TPS count values based on geolocation IPs. Using those DDoS protection policies, we prevented many DDoS attacks. The WAF ASM signature has helped us mitigate various cyber threats for clients, utilizing automated policy learning and traffic learning to avoid manual intervention in creating and hardening security rules.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition includes strong application delivery and load balancing without needing to purchase separate devices for LTM, ASM, and GTM, as all modules are available on a single device. The solution is reliable for hosting applications and performing load balancing and acts as a reverse proxy, providing unified public access for multiple applications. Additionally, the cost advantages compared to physical appliances are notable since pricing for physical appliances is significantly higher than for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Therefore, for enterprise clients, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is much more cost-effective and provides cost savings.

Moreover, F5 LTM has many reliable security features, including DDoS capabilities, DDoS protection, bot protection, IP reputation, and threat intelligence. These are key features available in F5 ASM to protect customer applications. F5 LTM, GTM, and F5 products enhance customer application experiences and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition supports deployment across various platforms in public clouds including AWS, Azure, VMware, KVM, and other hypervisors. These are major positive features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

Since we implemented F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have experienced better application performance and lower costs compared to hardware appliances, along with flexibility in deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition across multiple hybrid clouds. The solution provides a stronger security posture, operational efficiency, and automation facilitating deployment in automated modes. It integrates with various orchestration tools and SIEM tools, offering centralized management via BIG-IQ, and reduces server load and application load by cutting down on SSL encryption, decryption, and security analyses performed by different security tools and servers. This has led to a reduction in server count by up to 60 percent for improved application performance and SSL offloading.

The improvement points I can suggest are that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition tends to be highly resource-intensive, as we often encounter issues with high CPU, RAM, and storage utilization, particularly with ASM and LTM modules. Moreover, the licensing and pricing can be complex, and the pricing seems higher compared to other products. Certain virtual editions come with NIC limitations, permitting only two NICs for some VMs, and there are performance concerns when compared to hardware appliances, especially with high loads running on multiple modules simultaneously. Additionally, the device's GUI is not user-friendly, requiring admins to undergo significant training to begin administering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as it appears outdated. I would suggest considering pricing reductions, improving performance and resource consumption, and making the GUI more user-friendly.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for nearly six years.

Apart from issues with high CPU and memory utilization and resource consumption, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scalability is satisfactory as we can add necessary CPU and memory resources when needed, purchase new licenses, and add required features to scale the devices deployed on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We receive prompt customer support from the technical assistance center. However, we have experienced delays in support during non-business hours on weekends. For business hours and critical cases, prompt support is consistently provided.

Previously, we utilized VMware NSX cloud-native AVI load balancers and Array load balancers, but both of those had limited features compared to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancer and ASM. The existing solutions did not meet our feature requirements or customer demands, which is why we switched to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

In terms of return on investment, we have seen significant improvement in application performance after deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. This enhancement has led to better user experiences and attracted more business or application traffic, contributing to organizational growth.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been generally good, although it is managed by an account manager. While I encountered scenarios where the pricing was higher compared to other products, the overall experience was satisfactory, with proper support from the account and sales team during the procurement of new VMs.

We evaluated VMware AVI load balancer, WAF, and FortiWeb WAF before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I would advise others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to consider it based on their application architecture. If an application requires better performance, security postures, and reliable delivery, I would recommend using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I am satisfied with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and have no further additional thoughts on it. I would rate this product a 6 out of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is hosting a lot of SaaS-based applications. We host applications for multiple Fortune 500 companies, so there are many customers using the SaaS-based service. We apply application customization on every virtual server using iRules and compression. We utilize a lot of features on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

A specific example of how I'm using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for one of our SaaS-based applications involves a lot of customization needed for a certain application. This includes rewriting the HTTP header and recording the source IP addresses, the original source IP address of the user. We log the traffic and implement many other settings to improve the application's performance. We have implemented many things on our F5 load balancer.

I also host our DNS on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We have a lot of wide IPs configured and use it for many things including DPO or Active Directory, DNS. There are many things that we utilize F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers are mainly the Local Traffic Manager and DNS and advanced WAF feature, such as ASM. It offers us many features including L4-L7 load balancing, SSL offloading, health monitoring, persistence, traffic steering, and iRules programmability. On the DNS side, it helps us with global load balancing, DNS security, geographical-based routing, and resilience.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization as it is a very stable device. We have not experienced any kind of issues with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition most of the time. F5 support has been great. Whenever we run into any kind of issues or any assistance is needed, we can easily reach out to F5 support and they are able to help us very promptly. It created more resilient applications for our infrastructure. It was a good offering that we could build up using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancers.

I find myself relying on LTM, specifically virtual servers for hosting an application and load balancing across multiple backend servers. This is the major feature that we use. In case of high utilization of the application, or if there is huge traffic, we can add more servers and evenly distribute traffic, relying on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition performance.

I think we should have some features for getting more metrics. If we can get more metrics in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition GUI, I mean you have a BIG-IQ product, but if we can get some metrics and log metrics that show our utilization, performance, application response times in a more clear and more precise way, that would be great if that could be incorporated.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in our company for approximately five to six years.

I have rarely seen any kind of outages with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The performance increased significantly and the response times of the application improved. We could offer a lot of customization based upon the application to our customers. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has really helped in faster response times. Using its bundled features, we could utilize it for many things including security. We do not need to worry about the security for utilizing the application firewall on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable.

Its scalability is that it can be scaled up and down easily. We just need to increase our vCPUs and we can easily increase the license-based limits or the VM cloud platform limits. We can scale it up both vertically and horizontally. It is very effective.

The customer support has been very good. Whenever we run into any kind of issues or when any assistance is needed to dig deep into the logs, the customer support has been very helpful.

F5 support was excellent whenever it was needed during issues or when we needed assistance.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition from the very beginning and have not used any other solution.

I was brought into an environment where F5 BIG-IP was already deployed on physical infrastructure. As we progressed our journey towards the cloud, we made a move to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which was a clear choice from the very start. We never explored other options.

While I cannot discuss return on investment because I am not involved in that part of the business, I can discuss the ease of deployment and ease of operations. It is considerably easy to learn and get documentation on how to do things on the internet and F5 site. The knowledge available and free knowledge across the internet is very good. It is very easy to learn technologies if you are trying to explore more on the features. Support is very well available.

We use the best license, wherein we are using a subscription-based licensing for a one to two-year subscription, which can be scalable up and down during the entire term. In respect to the features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers, the licensing, the cost and everything seem appropriate and at par with the competition.

My advice is that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a very stable product. We need to understand that we need to choose the appropriate licensing before sizing the VM and how we design our application and use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is designed to scale out and scale up. We need to select an appropriate solution based upon our requirement. We need to evaluate it properly before we go for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancers. I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

Recently, we had a requirement from a customer who hosts a web application on a web server and needed to increase the availability of the website. We suggested and implemented a solution where we placed F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in front of the server and deployed three servers behind it, all hosting the same application. Using this approach, we have increased both the performance and availability of the application.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has a positive impact on our customers. As I shared in the example scenario, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped our customers increase the high availability and performance of their applications, specifically their web applications.

Another area for improvement is that training for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is not widely available. While there is paid training available on the F5.com website, there is generally no free training available for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

Positive

I gave it a 10 out of 10 because F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition truly solves a significant problem of high availability and traffic and performance improvement in web applications.

The metrics showing performance and availability improvement with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition include less downtime. Since we have increased redundancy on the web servers by placing three web servers behind F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, if one of the servers fails, the other two will serve the traffic. Additionally, faster response time is achieved because we have more compute power with three servers serving the same purpose and hosting the same website.

I would highly recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to everyone because we have had a phenomenal experience using this device. It is a very capable solution. We have used the Local Traffic Manager and we are in the process of implementing the Advanced Security Module, Application Security Module, or Advanced WAF.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a very good solution that solves many of the problems faced by small to medium-sized businesses.

In F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we are using the LTM and ASM module. We use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for L7 load balancing and SSL offloading.

In our case, we are totally working on a cloud environment, and we are using different cloud-native solutions across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Behind that, we are using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's LTM and ASM module, so any traffic that lands on our cloud-native will first load balance from our cloud-native load balancers. Apart from this, we are using firewalls as well. Layer 4 traffic inspection is done on that. Post that, for Layer 7 traffic inspection and application-level load balancing, we are using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's LTM and ASM module. LTM is especially used to load balance the application traffic to the real-time application servers or application load balancers. We have applied some profiles, policies, pools, and nodes. Apart from that, we are also applying an ASM policy on that virtual server so that Layer 7, which means OWASP Top 10 inspection, could be done for that application.

With the help of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we can deploy that virtual edition in any kind of virtual machine. We can use cloud-native virtual VMs, or we can also deploy that on VMs. Those are the main use cases of that.

For load balancing, we are using ASM solutions, which protects our applications from the OWASP Top 10, which is very critical for any applications. Our applications are protected against that, and there is no unwanted or unauthorized entry for any application due to the enforcement of ASM policy. This is also providing some learning suggestions, and many things are available. They can also provide signature-based detection. We can also do things including URL-based blocking or URL-based allowing, URI-based, or parameter-based filtering. There are multiple things on ASM policy. It is a huge combination of many policies.

It is always helpful because it always helps us in every case. Since we work in network security, it always helps with our monitoring and applying policies for our application security from a load balancing and application point of view.

As per my understanding, there is a need to improve support. Sometimes it is very critical to get support for that. Apart from that, the licensing part needs to be considered as well. If support is increased more than this, that will be more useful for the user.

If we could have a more stable subscription model and a smoother V-licensing workflow, especially in a cloud environment, that should be more flexible. Sometimes we face issues, and as I mentioned earlier, we need more support. If support is increased for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, that will be more helpful for us because it is very critical sometimes to call support.

In my experience, especially the last three times, I get less support on weekends, and that is very critical for us because we have to perform critical activities on weekends only. They need to increase support on weekends.

It has been around three years that I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable. It is a very stable solution.

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very good. It is the most scalable and reliable system. Its accuracy is also very high. From a scalability point of view, it is very good.

F5 support is knowledgeable and helpful for complex LTM and ASM issues. Resolution time can vary based on case-to-case and is dependent on priority.

I have never used any dedicated solution for OWASP Top 10 or load balancing. I was using native AWS, not a dedicated solution.

With the help of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, whenever we want to deploy a new machine or if we have any new application or any new environment, it is very easy for us to deploy those things. That will save our time as well as resources because it will not take time. It is very easy to deploy a virtual edition in any virtual environment.

Not yet, because when I onboarded here, it was already in place. We expanded its use and are working with it.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable. It is a very stable solution.

There is no doubt that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition saves resources. It also saves money, but in very few cases. Whenever, if we want to scale up or scale down our VMs per requirements, this will save our money because if we purchase hardware, it will cost every time, but due to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we are saving money. It also saves our resources because with fewer resources, we can do many things.

To be honest, the cost of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is not low, but since it provides enterprise-level security and everything, it should have that price.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very easy for our team because sometimes we know that there is peak traffic, such as when any festival comes and many users come to visit the site. At that time, as we are using the virtual edition, we have the feasibility to scale up. It is automatically scaled up with the help of our cloud-native solutions. That is the best practice, and we can scale up or scale down as per our requirement. I very much appreciate that virtual edition because we have this feasibility that we can scale up or scale down as per our requirement.

I have never used any dedicated solution for OWASP Top 10 or load balancing. I was using native AWS, not a dedicated solution.

Organizations, if you are using or if you want an enterprise-level solution, you definitely have to go with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is a little costly, but it is value for money. As I am working with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition with LTM and ASM, it is well-suited for enterprises that require advanced traffic management and strong web application security in a multi-cloud environment.

Overall, it is a good experience with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because I never worked with hardware, so it is very good for me. My rating for this solution reflects my satisfaction with the product and its capabilities.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is mostly for application hosting, load balancing, and reverse proxy.

A specific example of how I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for application hosting, load balancing, or as a reverse proxy is that we had limited sets of IP addresses for the public and multiple applications—around more than 100. We didn't have 100 public IPs for each application, so using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we used only one virtual server, and behind that, we were able to take all the 100 applications. Basically, using one public IP, we are hosting all of our 100 applications, which is a lot of cost saving and also less overhead on the administration side. This was one of the use cases for which we have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I have a few other use cases for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition where there was a requirement for a persistent session to be implemented to have the proper load balancing and maintain the session with the back-end server, and we have a few applications that use this persistence feature. Apart from that, we are also using the WAF on top of our virtual edition of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a part of the security enhancement and application security requirements.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers are all of them because we are using almost all of the features like load balancing, SSL offloading, and even the WAF, as I mentioned earlier. The most important thing is that whatever services or features we are using, it is very good in terms of performance, and it is a very stable platform for these applications without any issues. Overall, I am happy with its performance and stability across all the features that we are using.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively with cost savings, as I mentioned earlier, by saving public IP addresses, and its performance and stability, which give almost 100% uptime for the application because we have high availability. The security part is also helping us achieve that using the WAF module. Overall, the application stability and performance are all at par.

I feel that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved because overall, it is a pretty good product, but the licensing is rather costly. It would be great if the team can do something for their existing customers regarding the costing and the licensing because each module needs a separate license on top of the base LTM model, and that is one thing that I feel they should address for their customers.

While licensing is a main area for me, I think there is also a need to improve the iRule functionalities within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Currently, with iRules, the customer or administrator needs to investigate and write them, and there is no kind of base support for writing them. It would be an advantage if F5 creates a user interface or dashboard within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, so there would be ready, available iRules, or any support could be given on the platform itself instead of searching for it on outside websites.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition since my first job, so for around 10 years, I have been working on the different platforms and virtual editions of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The uptime improvements with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are almost close to 100%, as it only goes down if a failover happens. We do the failover on the weekends during off-business hours or during upgrades when required. Mostly, only in these scenarios could we see a bit of fluctuation or a glitch for the application. Apart from that, I do not see any issues. We have not had any issues, and it rarely happens that if there is an issue, it might cause a problem for some of the applications, but apart from that, I do not see any major issues happening in my past experience with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It was pretty much stable.

I can confidently say that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

Overall, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a scalable product, and with the licensing for the additional modules, whenever we need, we can add it on top of the existing licensing without any major impact. It is pretty much scalable and advanced. We can even have multiple units in high availability based on the requirement, and based on that, we can have active-active or active-passive configurations.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has pretty good customer support, and they also have pretty good documentation available on their community platform. Support is overall good.

Negative

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, and the most important metrics are the money and time saved because, as I mentioned earlier, there was less use of public IPs for each application, as well as less application overhead for the administrator to manage from the network point of view.

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that if you have any application or application delivery requirement where you need to host the application on the internet, and you need to fulfill different kinds of application requirements such as load balancing, persistence, security, SSL offloading, or WAF security for OWASP Top 10 signature attack mitigation, you should definitely explore F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is one of the best products that comes with a different feature set, and its performance is very good. Also, it is a pretty stable product on the platform. You should definitely explore this product for your use cases, and it is definitely going to fulfill your use cases.

Overall, I find F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition pretty good, and I always enjoy exploring it because it gives a variety of customizations that we can do as an administrator. I always look for new approaches or customizations for our use cases, and I enjoy experimenting with it. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is typically using F5 LTM and GTM, where LTM is for local traffic management and GTM handles different data load balancing. We have two data centers in two different locations, and through BIG-IP GTM, we perform cross-data-center load balancing. In each data center, we have to do unit management, and in total, we have over 100 units, with 60 being virtual editions.

For day-to-day tasks, whatever is operationally needed, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is definitely helping us a lot to keep applications available at all times.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers include iRule, which is the most important feature of F5 LTM. If a feature is directly not available in F5, we can achieve that using iRule, such as logging, redirection, HTTP to HTTPS blocking, and redirection at URI level or content level. These features are exceptional and even persistence-related features help us a lot in day-to-day tasks.

I find the customization feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition particularly useful, along with many other features such as Health Monitor, which we can use to monitor health. If something is not allowed and the application team wants us to blacklist some IPs, we can set up policy region-based controls and achieve that. These are great features of F5.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by simplifying management, as we previously had to manage hardware boxes. Now with the virtual edition, it is easy to use and reliable. We do not find any issues; we have been working with it for the last three to four years and not a single issue has been reported, making it a very reliable and stable product.

I do not wish for any improvements in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition; everything looks good for me. If anything is needed, we raise a ticket, and they take our feedback seriously.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for three years, and I am using F5 LTM virtual edition, which is a great product.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is indeed very stable.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is good; we get immediate responses based on priority.

Negative

In this organization, from the beginning, we have been using F5 LTM, but in my previous organization, I used Radware, and I found that F5 LTM edition is a more stable product.

Since moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we are getting a license directly from F5 and have deployed it over our VM, resulting in cost and time savings. Earlier, if hardware was faulty, we had to replace it, but now we simply run our OS over the VM, making it a great product.

My experience with pricing and setup costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was mixed, as they do not have an option for 10 gig licensing, which was costly for us. If they could also provide 5 gig and 6 gig licenses, that would be better.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I did not evaluate other options, as the decision completely came from the sales team. They asked for feedback, and since the feedback was great, I am not completely aware of the commercial part, but for us, it is serving our purpose with no issues.

A specific scenario where F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped solve a challenge for me is its ability to achieve high availability and make applications always available. It provides application-level availability, monitoring the health of applications. We even have the option to check the content and actual application status, allowing us to monitor the response code, which are great features of F5 LTM, making my work easier.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it is a reliable and stable product; they can definitely go for F5 LTM.

Currently, we are evaluating F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancer through a 30-day trial, and we are also supporting another project where our client is using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

Our main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that we have a DMZ zone for internal use where multiple servers or services such as HTTP or Telnet are available, and we use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for load balancing, ensuring reachability and load balancing for better services.

In the future, if any project comes along, we can suggest F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because we have multiple services such as HTTP and Telnet, along with our internal servers, which can be helpful for us. We plan to create multiple virtual IPs and create pools for customer separation to improve services.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has excellent features including easy configuration, allowing us to create separation for each client, and bridging mode for SSL client and SSL server, which is helpful for bridging and separation for the clients.

The bridging mode in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helps us and our clients because the client communicates with the SSL client, which only connects to the server's virtual IP without knowing which server provides the services, ensuring security. The internal F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancer connects to server services, functioning as an encrypt and decrypt system, ensuring separation, security features, and reachability from client to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helps us handle security and high availability in the best way since our client is using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, enhancing services with good customer feedback regarding service reachability and load balancing method and utilization, and we support this 24/7, so F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides these benefits to us.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition positively impacts our organization by improving user experience, performance, and security, which is very helpful for us.

There is nothing significantly to improve for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, but we need to configure the load balancer according to our requirements because by default, there is nothing. We can configure it according to our needs, such as nodes, pools, pool members, SSL, and services, allowing us to create profiles, templates, and iRules as needed, which are beneficial for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

For improvements, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could build in some enhanced security features, as multiple organizations, including ours, are using SD-WAN technology, and having that inbuilt with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition would provide a single point for multiple functionalities simultaneously.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is limited because we are going through the trial, so we do not know much about that yet. We will gain more knowledge and experience with it as we proceed through the evaluation.

Before trying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using proxy servers, but many companies are now switching to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because it offers a better solution than the proxy server.

We are still in the trial phase, so we have not seen a return on investment yet.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We are using the round-robin method with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which ensures a health check of the service servers and services. If any server is more utilized, another server will respond simultaneously, distributing the server services equally, and clients are happy even during interruptions, which is a beneficial feature.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition a 10 out of 10 because it is very user-friendly, has easy configuration, ensures reachability 24/7, and provides security along with easy configuration, backup process, and ease of doing everything according to our requirements.

I suggest others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to proceed with it for its good services, and after our trial version or if needed, we will take the trial again to explore further. In the future, for any projects or requirements, we can suggest it as we gain more knowledge about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which will be helpful for recommendations.