LoadBalancer Enterprise Reviews

My main use case for LoadBalancer Enterprise involves non-functional testing such as load testing and break-even point validation for our APIs and UIs. I use LoadBalancer Enterprise to simulate real-life traffic data. For example, when 1,000 users are trying to access a particular resource at a particular time, I simulate this using LoadBalancer by increasing and decreasing the number of virtual users to check the amount of load the server can take. I want to ensure that at any given point in time, 10,000 users or 20,000 users can access our software or website without any interruptions. I provide the virtual user numbers and different other parameters such as our server setup, server configuration, and the number of load balancers being used. After providing these specifics, I simulate the real-world scenario and check if the software is able to handle the load.

There are many types of load balancers, such as NGINX, which is a proxy, and those need to be validated with different types of testing. The number of availability and redundancy need to be checked, the health checks of the software need to be validated, and as a load balancer, I need to check how much traffic it is able to handle at a given point in time.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is very useful in the case of a multifaceted software system. For example, when I do not know exactly how many users are going to be using it at a given point in time, LoadBalancer Enterprise ensures that it distributes the load properly so that the system is not broken and it is available for all users seamlessly.

When I say it distributes the load properly, LoadBalancer Enterprise provides several affinity mechanisms such as cookie, resource, IP, and header-based options. For stateful healthcare workflows and banking transactions where session context matters, these options are flexible and reliable. In stateful failover edge cases, I need to make sure it is working properly, and those are the things I need to validate.

LoadBalancer Enterprise simulates production traffic profiles by using a realistic traffic generator that models different requests and transaction mixes such as reads and writes, leveraging replay traffic from sanitized production traces whenever possible. LoadBalancer Enterprise allows me to simulate chaos and failure injection by integrating chaos testing to validate retry and back-off behavior, connection drain, and upstream slowdown scenarios. I can validate that rate limits and circuit breakers are functioning properly.

LoadBalancer Enterprise has given my company the confidence that our software is sustainable and scalable according to our design. I can approach customers with confidence that they will not be facing any issues such as unavailability of services or any interruptions during their work. This confidence gives my company an edge over competitors.

LoadBalancer Enterprise could provide more flexibility in terms of configuration setup, making it more user-friendly when switching between other software.

LoadBalancer Enterprise could work more on content caching by bypassing the back-end server more often and making the cache more accessible so that it gives better and more robust results. The autoscaling integration could be improved as well. DDoS mitigation is helpful, but there are some cases where it does not recognize the threat, so those are areas it could work on.

I have been using LoadBalancer Enterprise for the last three to four years.

I have definitely seen very lesser downtimes after I implemented the different load balancer functionalities. The regular health checks that LoadBalancer Enterprise performs using regular Jenkins jobs utilize all the functionalities of LoadBalancer Enterprise to make sure everything is working perfectly according to my design. This has given a positive impact to my overall software, which boosts confidence for both me and customers.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is pretty stable.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is very useful in the case of a multifaceted software system. For example, when I do not know exactly how many users are going to be using it at a given point in time, LoadBalancer Enterprise ensures that it distributes the load properly so that the system is not broken and it is available for all users seamlessly.

Previously, I was using Kafka, and I wanted a more scalable, robust, and synchronous setup for my software. I switched to LoadBalancer Enterprise because the buffer time in Kafka was very high, and it is synchronous. The event ingestion and message queuing were not optimized, so I switched to LoadBalancer Enterprise.

LoadBalancer Enterprise has optimized my traffic by about 20 to 30%. There are very lesser downtimes in terms of my overall data, including software deployment, development, and testing cycles. LoadBalancer Enterprise has drastically improved my productivity. The overall improvement is about 30%.

I purchased LoadBalancer Enterprise through the AWS marketplace. With the licensing and setup cost, I think it is pretty good, but the overall cost is not something I am aware of. That is handled by the DevOps team, so I am not sure about that.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is very useful, and I believe others should go for it. Obviously, it is the call of the DevOps team and the overall system designers and architects to make a decision. However, comparing it with other tools, LoadBalancer Enterprise is pretty solid in terms of distributing workloads, so you can go ahead. I would rate this product an 8.

I am utilizing the cloud version of LoadBalancer Enterprise currently, as I have done the deployment in AWS Cloud, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud as well. I am using all types of cloud, having done private cloud implementations for our environment and public cloud environments with AWS, Google, and Azure.

I utilize LoadBalancer Enterprise's SSL Termination feature, and options are available to do SSL Termination both in the cloud and in the F5. I have successfully used the SSL Termination feature in F5.

The Advanced Health Check feature in LoadBalancer Enterprise is available, and it has helped in maintaining optimal server performance.

Performance-wise with LoadBalancer Enterprise, I haven't seen any issues between on-premises and the cloud. If there are any performance-related issues, I have the option to automatically upgrade and increase the instances, memory, and CPU configurations. I never come across any performance-related issues in the cloud environment.

When evaluating LoadBalancer Enterprise's application level monitoring, it is similar to the on-premises monitoring capabilities. Additionally, the instance level monitoring is taken care of by AWS Cloud, which continuously monitors CPU, memory, and network usage, sending status updates to the operations teams. Compared to on-premises monitoring, I find the AWS Cloud setup beneficial, as it allows for immediate upgrades when alerts are raised for high CPU utilization, which is a significant advantage.

The intuitive interface of LoadBalancer Enterprise assists me with monitoring network traffic, including options to monitor the network queue and throughput effectively.

Among the best features in LoadBalancer Enterprise, I note that some features are still not enabled compared to the on-premises environment. For example, if I want to deploy certain web policies, I am unsure if they are currently enabled. There are some parameters and configurations, such as persistent configurations, that were not available. I could only host limited applications like HTTPS and HTTP; some complex applications were not supported, and I faced these issues a few years ago. Recently, I have not done any cloud migrations, but I can see that I am now able to migrate most applications. However, some persistent-related configurations were not working, and I am uncertain whether they have solved that issue. These were the major challenges I have encountered.

I have been using LoadBalancer Enterprise in the enterprise environment for almost more than twenty years.

I have communicated with LoadBalancer technical support when facing licensing issues, particularly when needing to move licenses to different instances. When I request the release of the license from the old device, they usually respond appropriately. I can expect a response within fifteen to twenty minutes after I put in a ticket to release the license. While their support is good, the ongoing need to contact F5 for license releases can be a problem from an operational perspective, causing loss of production time, which is a disadvantage I see.

Based on my experience with LoadBalancer Enterprise support, I would rate their responsiveness for releasing licenses a ten. For supporting other aspects, I would give them a rating of six or seven.

I did face challenges when implementing LoadBalancer Enterprise in the cloud environment, as it is not quite easy. There were multiple options available, such as bring your own license and purchasing from the market. I needed to do a deep analysis to determine which option was suitable for the client based on their requirements. Some clients decided to purchase licenses from a vendor, while others chose to use BYOL. For scenarios such as the DR environment, I would only be testing during the DR test period, after which I would shut down these instances. For that need, I chose to go with the marketplace. Some clients wanted continuous production, so I opted for the bring your own license model, as purchasing from the marketplace might cost more. I have faced a couple of ways to choose the license for installation, and initially, the setup and configuration were a bit difficult to handle. After the first device installation, I managed to document what I needed for deployment, making subsequent implementations easier for me.

The approximate timeframes to implement LoadBalancer Enterprise's solution begin with the initial implementations, which can bring up the box in a couple of hours. After that, if there are any migrations or if I'm migrating applications from my own environment to the cloud, that is going to take a lot of time; it cannot be done immediately. I need to work with the backend applications team to bring up those applications, migrate my configurations from on-prem to cloud, verify it, and work with the network team to ensure reachability. During the cutover, I need to shift traffic from on-prem to the cloud, which is a lengthy process. The initial deployment of LoadBalancer Enterprise can be done in a couple of hours, making it live is achievable within that timeframe.

In the deployment of LoadBalancer Enterprise, multiple teams are usually involved for setting up the entire system, as I need an AWS Cloud team, applications team, database team, and security team to facilitate all migrations. However, for deployment purposes, one team is sufficient; in my case, I had three to four engineers. For smaller migrations, I can handle it with one engineer, but for a larger installation of LoadBalancer Enterprise with fifteen to twenty load balancers, one engineer suffices, whereas for migrating one hundred or two hundred, that is when more engineers might be needed.

Regarding the pricing of LoadBalancer Enterprise, I only pay for a license, and whatever license I use doesn't require the same CAPEX investment as physical hardware. I purchase the license depending on my needs. Bring your own license might involve a significant expenditure, whereas the marketplace provides advantages such as the ability to release the license if I'm not using it. When devices are brought back online, I can get the license through the marketplace easily. This system allows me to store snapshots of configuration settings in cloud storage, releasing instances and licenses as needed. Overall, these features highlight the benefits of using LoadBalancer Enterprise compared to on-premises equipment, though I remain unsure of the backend costs associated with the cloud solution.

I do participate in the deployment process of LoadBalancer Enterprise. I would rate this review a nine overall.

My main use case for LoadBalancer Enterprise is for high availability, as we always have primary and secondary servers. When one is down, the second one is good to handle the load. Instead of providing two IPs or two DNS, we put a load balancer IP, and the load balancer will automatically switch over to either one. We also use it for traffic distribution, particularly for routing based on API hits.

LoadBalancer Enterprise offers two types of load balancers: application-based and traffic-based. This is the main feature, allowing it to route based on traffic and server. It always sends data to one server, and once that is down, it picks the second.

We rely more on server-based routing in our environment because we work with many servers for important tools such as Splunk, Cribl, and Dynatrace. We always have standby servers, so if the primary encounters an issue, we can easily route our traffic to the active secondary server in our active-passive scenario.

LoadBalancer Enterprise has a good user interface, making it easy to manage, and the failover functionality is also impressive. The product itself is very stable.

LoadBalancer Enterprise has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to manage my Splunk cluster indexers with 10 servers behind one load balancer. I don't need to remember all 10 IPs, and I can easily add new servers to the group managed by the load balancer.

This approach has reduced many errors. Previously, when a server went down, it took a long time until someone reported it. Now, we achieve about 99% availability across all servers thanks to the health check feature in the load balancer.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is a very stable product that meets our needs. If they could reduce the prices, it would be beneficial.

Documentation needs improvement because having information is essential for working with advanced configurations. Advanced features in AWS settings could also be better documented, and reporting and analytics could be made more advanced to offer better traffic insights.

I have been using LoadBalancer Enterprise for almost six or seven years, as I use it in all the companies I work for.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is mostly seamless; however, if both servers are down, we need maintenance. In 90% to 99% of cases, I can say it is seamless.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is easy to scale, maintain, and modify, which makes adding or removing servers a simple process.

Customer support is good; generally, we don't need much support since the product is stable, but they respond immediately when we do reach out. I rate customer support a 10.

We didn't use any other solutions prior to LoadBalancer Enterprise, although I was aware of F5, we decided against purchasing it.

I don't know about the pricing since I never personally purchased it; the setup cost is cheap and licensing is also reasonably priced.

My main use case for LoadBalancer Enterprise is to ensure my servers are available and are accessible to customers around the world.

I have three-node servers around which I set up the load balancer within them. In case one of them goes off, the load balancer can switch over to the next one. The servers use a virtual IP to connect to our application and then it detects the health of each of the servers. Only when they are down does the load balancer switch over to the next available healthy server and services are restored to our users.

The best features that LoadBalancer Enterprise offers include Round Robin, where different servers are available, and also the VRRP and the virtual IP as well.

The Round Robin and virtual IP features help me by ensuring that traffic is routed across all the nodes. Whatever is available receives the traffic. There is no queue. Any server that is available takes over the master role and brings that service back to the application so that it continues running.

The major feature of load balancing is to ensure that all services are available around the clock and at any time. Having multiple options is a significant advantage that I enjoy with load balancing.

LoadBalancer Enterprise has impacted my organization positively by making our applications and services available to all users across the globe. Even when we have issues with the firewalls, nodes, or application database, customers do not need to know because on the back end, we are able to access the application through another node with the help of the load balancer.

LoadBalancer Enterprise could be improved in terms of cost.

I have been using LoadBalancer Enterprise for a little over one year.

LoadBalancer Enterprise is stable.

The customer support is very good.

With load balancing in place, there has been a high inflow of satisfaction from customers. The company could make more money. Additionally, there are no issues with the availability of applications across the board.

One of the reasons why we went for LoadBalancer Enterprise is because of losing revenue when services are not available. With load balancing, services are available. A customer can make payments and there has been improvement in terms of income.

My advice to others looking into using LoadBalancer Enterprise is that it is a good product and they can be very certain it will work for them as they require. I believe this review has a rating of ten.

Our primary use case for Loadbalancer.org is on the presale point for clients who use the solution for balancing loads.

The most valuable features of Loadbalancer.org are related to its load balancing capabilities.

There is room for improvement in Loadbalancer.org in certain areas.

For a significant period of time, I have had experience with Loadbalancer.org at the presale point.

Loadbalancer.org is stable. I have not encountered any bugs or glitches while working with it.

When it comes to scalability, Loadbalancer.org is flexible.

Technical support from Loadbalancer.org is satisfactory.

The initial setup of Loadbalancer.org can be challenging.

Pricing of Loadbalancer.org is something to consider.

For bigger organizations, I would recommend considering other solutions like Radware.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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're working on a project where our customers use HJ. We utilize their load balancer to evenly distribute the data load between multiple servers, ensuring that one server doesn't become overloaded.

Since I'm relatively new to the load-balancing scene, my current focus is primarily on data load-balancing.        

If all the data traffic is directed to a single server, it can become overwhelmed. Load balancing helps us distribute both incoming and outgoing data loads evenly among the servers, preventing overload on a single server.

We could enhance the security aspects of the load balancer. For instance, when data passes through the load balancer, it could potentially include sensitive files or trade-related data. It would be beneficial to have additional features that help identify and protect against any unauthorized access or file leakage.

I have been using it for past two months.

It is scalable and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We're not currently using it because I've been testing it for about a month, and so far, everything seems fine.

The choice of environment depends and specific needs and requirements. The setup process for the testing phase typically takes me around 30 minutes to an hour. It involves installing the tool and entering necessary information like SSL details. The staffing requirement depends on the project's size, with a small-scale solution typically requiring only one person to manage. I would rate it seven out of ten.

So far, I would rate it around a five out of ten. 

Loadbalancer.org is highly valuable for organizations dealing with extensive file transfers. It helps prevent server overload by distributing the load across multiple servers, ensuring stability and enhancing security.

I would rate it an eight 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.