F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We use F5 BIG-IP with LTM burst, SM burst, and ETM burst. We use it in our cloud service and all our service centers. We even offer F5 BIG-IP to our partners.

As a firm, we use F5 BIG-IP to provide load balancing over many to increase one of the hardware appliances that carries loads over the throughput they are providing. 

Ultimately, the service has not affected our customers. However, there was a failure in one of the nodes that became infected.

F5 BIG-IP did not sense that the virus was there. The security didn't function.

F5 BIG-IP is used with good applications and functions as an application firewall with additional features.

I've been building F5 BIG-IP. We will not use any feature or any service unless there is a business case and there is a need for business implementation. 

The products are great and easy to upgrade from time to time to improve functionality. F5 BIG-IP is working fine. We use it more in production and operations.

There are issues with F5 BIG-IP but they are minor issues, not big ones. This does not affect production and services.

Sometimes the operations and the facility systems fail. However, there is an alert action from the windows. 

Related to the groups, when it comes to cost, rates are regulated. When the market is not good, then we will consider doing the increase. 

In general, there are more features that could be provided with F5 BIG-IP if it were not so costly.

From application to application to customer respects, you can't always customize software based on customer requirements. If you don't consider that, you can't deliver.

F5 BIG-IP is very stable.

F5 BIG-IP has good scalability. We have a team managing the product. The team consists of three specialists, but they do not manage that many customers, they manage customers.

We're beginning to align well with F5 BIG-IP. I've been in contact with customer service.

I have notifications from the alert window and all of the issues would be resolved.

The initial setup is not straightforward. You can consider F5 BIG-IP as a standard. It is not complex. In the end, the product itself is serving the business and services.

For deployment, we used one engineer only. The main point to consider is the client's position. We have to respect the client's business requirements.

5 BIG-IP is too expensive at the current licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options but chose 5 BIG-IP on basis of merit.

We use F5 BIG-IP a lot in production right now. The product is indispensable to us.

I would rate the product an overall nine out of ten. Most of the benefits of F5 BIG-IP are cyclical because of the licensing costs.

F5 has performed marvelously. It certainly holds in value and holds its name.

We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance.

I would like to see improvement in the manageability and easier setup. 

They need to have features that you can turn on and spin up and not have to buy a license for. I'd want to be able to quickly spin up a feature and start using it and then come back and pay for it later. Citrix has them beat on that. 

F5s are rock solid. I've seen them deploy in major data centers and they're rock solid.

Scalability is similar to Citrix NetScaler where you can pay as you grow. It doesn't have the feature which you can just turn on. You have to buy into it, then you have to wait for the license, and then you have to wait to have somebody to pay for it. You can't deploy quickly.

F5 technical support is good. They have a lot of good people there. Once you get into the area of expertise that you need help with, those people are very good at helping with the problem. Every time I call in, I go right to tech support and they're really good help. 

The initial setup can be complex but it's not because of the F5 itself. It's because of your own network. You can get in your own way. What makes it complex is the fact that you have to stand back and figure out the configuration. F5 is there to help you with that and give you some idea on where to place it and what to do. Some of that also falls underneath the realm of managed services or just services in general. They start you with a brand new spiffy product, but you're left with the migration process. 

They are expensive. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. Not a ten because of the usability and a manageability. I've had to send somebody to F5 University to get trained, whereas with the Citrix NetScaler I don't necessarily have to send them out to training. I was able to pick up NetScaler right away. Whereas, F5, if you have it, you should probably get trained on it because it's a little more esoteric. 

Everybody wants the best of a name brand. If F5 was like a Tesla, would you want to buy a Tesla or a Toyota? They're both big name brands, but when you hear Tesla, you know exactly what that is; it's the futuristic top-of-the-line electric car. If you can afford a Tesla, then buy the Tesla but if you can't afford a Tesla, and you want something that's going to get you from point A to point B at a halfway decent price, go with Citrix.

We are primarily using it for load balancing, and with BIG-IQ managing Layer 7 security policies.

We did get good flexibility as well as the capabilities to accept declarative API and create per app dashboard and create a better view on the telemetry dashboard.

• Cloud templates 
• Declarative onboarding
• API service gateway
• Policy-based security management.

Services to be improved: 

• Multi-cloud consistency, like to simplify administration with centralized policies with multi-cloud vendors
• F5 lateral scalability within the container is still restricted.
• Web application firewalls and service mesh would be a nice-to-have feature.
• Drive programmable application with 100% restful API
• Cover deployment
• Monitoring
• Policy-based control. 

We use it to deliver services on the cloud.

It improves the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining applications and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks.

• Application security
• Automation
• Orchestration
• It is a fast and available solution. 

They have to scale, developing more products.

I would like them to have more flexible models.

It is the perfect solution when you have high workloads in your IT environment.

They have the potential to scale in better way.

I have integrated F5 rules for AWS with web exploits and OWASP Rules, and it is so easy to deploy.

There are three relevant things about purchasing through the AWS Marketplace:

1. It Increase protection against web attacks.
2. It integrates with AWS WAF, which makes it easy to deploy without changes to your infrastructure.
3. F5 manages your AWS WAF rules, so you don't have to.

We purchased through the AWS Marketplace because it was a popular way to go, and we were intrigued. The price of this product is not an issue. They have good pricing and licensing.

It helps you to manage workloads in a better way on your cloud environment.

I also have integrated it on my private cloud.

This is for remote access to an internal network of the organization to do all types of work. The requirement for VPN is secure with high performance.

Two issues found in using BIG-IP VPN compared with Cisco VPN:

1. Performance: Two applications are being used: remote desktop (RDP or rdesktop) and VNC viewer. Comparisons are done on the same client machines (Windows 10 and Linux 16.04) over the same network. When using Cisco VPN, applications are working smoothly while occasionally jittery. When using F5 VPN, applications are quite jittery. Sometimes applications are useless (too slow to refresh the screen).
2. Client support: Cisco VPN has more Clients supported than BIG-IP, e.g., BSD.

Still not clear why our IT decided to switch to F5 BIG-IP after two years experience. It appears as if there may be some advantage (possibly) related to security concerns (more secure?).

Performance is the first thing and most critical issue that needs improvement.

Supporting more Clients would be nice, but without improving performance, F5 will not widely be used for critical work. It killed an international meeting the first time that we used BIG-IP VPN.

Performance: Using the product, applications are jittery.

No issues.

We used Cisco VPN. I am not sure why our IT forced us to switch to F5 without our feedback.

Initial setup is easy and pretty standard. Setup is not much different from all other VPNs.

In-house.

Unless the price difference is large, this is not the primary concern for the product. The performance and product-related issues (secure for VPN, multi-function for network device, etc.) are the keys.

No.

We are using it primarily for load balancing. We also make great use of SSL interception (offloading and onloading), packet inspection, rewriting, and DNS wide IP.

It is a very good, flexible solution. It helps us to catch up on flaws in our partner solutions on top of its load balancing feature.

Along with load balancing, we perform a lot of packet inspections, URL rewriting, and SSL interceptions via iRule. 

I would recommend that the cost be lowered.

User tracking: Needs to provide a visual interface to follow a customer's activity (from client to BIG-IP to SNAT IP to the chosen server, then back). Today, we are still performing packet captures.

Not so far.

Not so far.

So far, we have not had to contact them.

We previously used Cisco ACE, which has very limited features.

The initial setup is straightforward. The GUI interface is user-friendly.

Software upgrades have been performed by F5 teams.

The initial migration was done by our technical team. 

The last implementation was done by the F5 team. I would rate them as a nine out of 10. I am not giving a 10 because we encountered some difficulties with the software upgrade from version 11 to version 12.

ROI is four years.

If you are planning to use security features, better to go for strong hardware and the best bundle license, which is great for web security.

No.

We use it for local traffic management and for the application firewall. We are trying to deploy virtual appliances in AWS. 

It has improved our program performance and security.

• The web application firewall.
• The configuration and integration into the AWS environment was pretty easy.
  

We would like to see load balancing between the cloud and the on-premise, a straightforward deployment feature.

The stability is almost there. Sometimes it hangs or there are unpredictable performance issues.

It's easier to scale.

Technical support could be better.

The price is high.

We looked at A10. When deciding whether to go with F5 or A10 it depends on the business requirements. Sometimes I propose one and sometimes I propose the other. It depends on the customer's requirements and budget. For our internal use we went with F5 because it's the best tool.

The on-prem version and the AWS versions are almost the same.

In terms of the experience purchasing through AWS marketplace, because we are a partner, the way we purchase it from AWS is different. We don't buy directly from the market.

Overall, it's a good product.

We use it for brokering services.

It has made it a single entry point for all users, verging across all the VPCs. It is more of an SSO solution versus multitier user loggin.

• Central point of entry for our user base.
• User authentication
• PPI
• Integration with our website.

We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them. On the back-end, we have a SafeNet component. They are going to bring additional features in, so allowing integration with encryption and PKI, and tying it back into Microsoft AD in the back with an LDAP lookup for users.

The stability seems fine. We provide fault tolerance with HA, so we have two of them up and running. We have built in integration. Therefore, we do not worry about workload issues

It seems very scalable now. We have 200 users, going to about 10,000 within the next year. There are multiple VPCs and multiple AWS accounts.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment seems to be pretty straightforward. There doesn't seem to be anything complex. We haven't needed anything additional, like Professional Services.

We did use technical support on the original engineering.

We have seen ROI because we are not hosting it. We moved this to the cloud for our ingest, so our workload is moving to the cloud and Amazon.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there.

We have found the pricing and licensing on AWS to be competitive.

We looked at F5, Citrix, and VMware. We chose F5 because it has a better market name, seemed to be vendor-agnostic for providing capabilities that others didn't, and its reputation.

Use F5. It has a good reputation. We experienced easy implementation and had an overall good experience.

We use it only on AWS.