F5 VIPRION [EOL] Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we deploy for our customers. I have deployed VIPRON six different times so far. Our customers are in the banking industry.

Our clients primarily use this solution in core banking for handling card-based transactions.

The most valuable feature is the SSL upload. It is very useful.

The performance is good.

It is easy to use and it doesn't take much experience.

Customization is very good.

The pricing for this solution should be reduced so that it can be more competitive.

I have been working with F5 VIPRON since 2015.

The stability of F5 is great.

This solution is for big clients in industries such as banking, finance, and the stock market. Small companies do not use it at all.

Technical support from F5 is good, and the community support is very good as well. You can search the community for issues, documentation, deployment models, and so forth. It is very useful.

I have also worked with the Citrix application delivery controller (ADC), and am familiar with A10. I think that F5 and Citrix are at the top of this market.

This product is quite easy to deploy. The only thing that you need expertise in is Azure so that you can fully integrate it into the system.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the environment. For large systems, it will take three or four weeks to deploy. Smaller systems will take perhaps two.

Three teams contribute to the deployment including the F5 engineer, who is familiar with the device, the F5 application team, and the infrastructure team. At least four or five people are involved. 

The price of this solution can be quite high, and it is determined based on the size that is required for the environment.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this product is that the sizing must be correct, which is because of the cost of the device and the license. We sometimes have problems because pre-sales engineers will suggest a lower model to save on costs, but this results in substandard performance that cannot handle the level of throughput and concurrent connections. It is very important to have the sizing assessed properly.

Overall, I think that the product is very good and our only complaint is about the pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for an internet application called MyPension.be, where every Belgian citizen can search for information regarding his employment and pension. That's the primary application.

In addition, we use the solution for our internal business core application. We have 2,600 internal and external users. Theoretically, there are 10 million potential users but most don't access it. We've had times when we've broken records, and that's usually connected to publicity in the press. 

The most significant improvement would be to make the product cheaper. 

For additional features, it's currently unfortunate that the network firewall isn't really a next-generation firewall. If that were included, then we wouldn't have taken on Fortinet as well. Our problem is that we have a relatively small number of staff that is continually being reduced. It's easier to deal with one product and several screens rather than two products, Fortinet and F5. The inverse is also true, if Fortinet was a stronger product, then we probably wouldn't have taken F5.

We've been using the product for six years.

We had one problem with stability five or six years ago when we first started with VIPRION but since then it's been fine.  

The product is scalable. We are using the basic VIPRION server. There are several levels of the module so a company can upgrade if necessary and the module we currently use can be scaled further. We started with the first module, and then migrated to the second. We can expand further if necessary. When we upgraded it was to give better support to cell traffic.  

We generally rely on an integrator for support. We have several good specialists so rarely need to contact technical support. If there's a problem we make contact and open a ticket. We've worked with several integrators and we're satisfied with every one of them. 

The first step was the most difficult with the setup because we were starting from scratch with a new solution. By the time we went from Big-IP to VIPRION, it was less difficult and the migration was done by an integrator. We're not technical specialists so an integrator was necessary. We are using it and managing it, and we can change the policies and things like that, but when we have to do a big migration an integrator is essential.

For others wishing to implement, you need to be very clear about what you want to do, how you want to protect your data and then search for a solution. It could be F5 or something else. When we asked for a review of the product, we provided a description of the features we wanted, and they proposed F5 and Fortinet for the same money. I think Fortinet has fewer features than F5.

Fortinet is okay, although it does require two appliances so if you also want a low bouncer you have to buy for the low bouncer and Fortinet. When you take F5 only one appliance is necessary and it's a simple configuration. When you low bounce it, you create your virtual server and it's very simple to connect or configure a security policy on top of that.
I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution to balance the traffic that we receive from other communication companies, which we are using for financial projects.

The solution itself is perfect. It's easy to configure and we haven't had any initial issues with the hardware or power supply.

The price is very high. They should work to make it more competitive. It would help if the licensing model was better.

The support has not been helpful in terms of responding to and finding solutions to issues.

It's hard to scale down the solution. You need to buy another product in order to do this.

We've been using the solution for three years so far.

The solution is very stable.

In terms of scalability, sometimes we want to scale back some features, as opposed to scaling up. We've been told we need to buy another product in order to make that happen. It would be better if they would allow for both scaling down as well as up.

We have about 1,000 users on the solution currently. They are all our bank employees and mostly from the IT department. They include IT managers and admins.

We have reached out to technical support once in the past. They were not able to resolve the problem. We're not satisfied with their level of support.

The initial setup is very easy. Installation is very straightforward.

The first time we used the solution we installed it with the help of F5 partners from which we bought the product. The second time we installed the solution we were able to handle the installation ourselves.

The licensing costs are very high for the solution. It's quite expensive.

We are currently looking to revisit Barracuda among other solutions. We're evaluating them right now.

I'm familiar with the F5 1600. We have one for the application delivery controller and the other one as a net traffic manager.

We are on the F5 network with other communication parties.

I'd recommend he solution for those organizations that have the budget for it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher, but the company was not able to support us when we initially had problems with the solution.

The most valuable feature is the vertical scaling of the application infrastructure. If we buy one chassis and we have one or two blades on it that requires us to add to the infrastructure, we can add another blade for the same chassis and scale up our infrastructure.

It's state of the art technology. They do a good job. I love working with F5.

In a Cisco chassis, you can have switching modules and firewall services modules. F5 should have these things. 

F5 has everything except for switching. F5 is not a switch. F5 is an application delivering a networking switch. F5 is not a network switch. It has shared networking services. It has a shared application. It has three kinds of deployment modes. You can use it in three kinds of modes. 

I have been using F5 for 12 years. 

We have needed to contact their technical support and they were excellent. 

The initial setup is complex but it is manageable. It requires basic configuration. It took a few weeks to deploy.

I would advise someone considering this solution to learn about TMOS and F file, explore the basic features, learn about the F5 modules and then buy a VIPRION chassis. 

It's a very good product. I love this product.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. Not a ten just because everything has room for improvement.