F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

We use it as an LTM and as a reverse proxy to publish web services.

It helps us recognize sessions from certain IPs that are authorized to manage the application. This is a function we haven't found anywhere else.

The most helpful thing is that it's open-source. It's very easy to program and customize.

Logging is a bit of a problem. Logging and monitoring are only in plain text. You have to search and you have to know what you are searching for to find anything. So of course, monitoring and getting alerts for abnormal situations is hard. There are no tools for monitoring and alerts. If you have problems and you need to diagnose them, you really have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.

Logging and monitoring could be something out-of-the-box that are more accessible.

Stability is one of the advantages. It's very stable.

We haven't bumped into scalability issues. The limitation is actually through licensing. Throughput is limited by licensing. We had an error with the license and we reached the limit but we fixed that. But there has never been trouble with the capacity or scalability.

I have never used technical support directly. I use F5 through integration services and there were a few times they didn't know how to resolve an issue and they had to turn to support. But there were answers every time.

We used Microsoft Gateway called CMG. This product was end-of-life, they decided to kill the product. We switched because there is no other solution that does the same thing.

It was complex compared to the Microsoft system. But after we learned the product and understood how it works, it worked seamlessly.

We only use a fraction of the capabilities of F5. There are different modules that we have heard others speak highly of, but we don't want to use them locally. It's an on-premise server. For example, there is a WAF (web application firewall) model and others that we don't use. 

It's not a cheap product, but there are no other replacements for what we do with it.

We checked other options, but nothing could deliver the solution we need.

I would advise excessive testing before moving to production. It's a new product, it's a "language." You have to learn the product thoroughly before you really can implement it.

GTM and LTM are the primary uses of the solution. Our company has two active data centers and a data center that is being activated. F5 BIG-IP helps us a lot. 

Global DNS, Link Controller, and Server Load Balancer provide our company service with high availability.

Valuable features include Link Controller and Server Load Balancer with cloud support and application enhancement security.

Internet and cloud support could be improved. Security enhancement should be more user friendly.

Publishing of many applications through the F5 reverse proxy to the Internet.

We are also using the F5 as an IdP server.

• It makes the publishing of applications to the Internet safer.
• Permanent updates give us more security.

• The automatic inspection of, e.g., SSL (TLS) traffic. 
• It is an easy way to build application policies (graphical).

It would help to get more training, even better in local languages. While we are able to speak and understand English, sometimes it is much easier to use the language you truly understand.

Previously we had an IdP on a Linux server. However, this was a pain to configure. With the F5 this has become easy. Therefore, more and more of our applications are now transferred to SAML.

I really like the ease of use of it in general. If I were to choose one in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool.

The SharePoint SSO part has some room for improvement. Opening documents and spreadsheets on local applications in on our specific situation is not possible.

None at all.

No issues with scalability.

F5 is a big company. They have a great community and TAC. The advantage with this product is that it isn't new. They have many engineers who have been working with it for a long time and have a lot of experience.

We used to have a Barracuda WAF. It was unreliable and it didn’t have all the features of the F5. It was out of maintenance and we decided never to use Barracuda again.

Easy switch from our Barracuda to F5. The setup was done with an engineer. However, if you pay good attention you can manage it afterwards. I also have a F5 test environment on a VM. These cost around $100 but are worth that money for testing purposes.

We tried FortiADC briefly. However the big contender was Citrix NetScaler.

Be sure of what you will use. F5 isn’t cheap but is worth the price. Also, take a good look at all the different options and make sure you take the correct hardware platform. You can always add more licenses, but if the physical device isn’t up to the task you’re stuck.

The primary use case is the common use case for everyone. It has performed well.

The benefit is security. It's able to track issues, the attacks. So that enables us to catch the attacks before they hit us. We are able to nail them down.

DDOS protection.

They can improve on the DDOS solution and have more stable solutions.

It's stable.

I haven't done any upgrades yet, but it is scalable to some extent.

Technical support is good. I would rate it seven out of 10.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the market value, the cost, and the stability of the product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10 because it fulfills my requirements.

Implementing load balancing services inside managed hosting services based on VMware solutions. The solution is presented as IaaS. F5 BIG-IP VE will be implemented in cooperation with the Cisco ACI solution.

F5 will improve our position in the customer service market. We plan to create packages of services from which it will be possible to build comprehensive tailor-made solutions.

Beyond the basic balancing function, other modules are important to us. In particular, a web application firewall, application security module, and a remote access module for customer applications.

As a service provider, we will target F5 BIG-IP VE solutions to customers who request infrastructure as a service. Improvements should enable customers to build a tailor-made solution in the future through a service portal.

• LTM for balancing
• ASM for WAF

I'm a system integrator, not a customer. Usually F5 meets customer expectations well. It's best of breed and an industry leader.

Security and Reporting.

As a pre-sale engineer, I'm not working with the F5 solution but I'm studying F5's features and competitor benchmarking.

When WAF is enabled, you can see a decrease in performance.

Not to date.

Very good.

Citrix NetScaler. F5 supports better features, from load balancing to security and application visibility. NetScaler is better with a VDI solution.

Not applicable.

F5 is more expensive than other solutions, so you have to be sure F5 is the best solution to fit the requirements.

Citrix, RadWare, and LBL.

You need the right skills to deploy it. Complex deployment requires TCL language knowledge.

• Great load balancing
• Solid OS
• Great support

Far superior to DNS Round-Robin load balancing; great HTTP and HTTPs redirection.

Fixing bugs.

About 11 years, I believe.

Older OS releases may have had some bugs (active/active on reboot, I think we saw on one OS version). Very stable OS over all. We had one issue on our upgrade to 11.x where I had to engage F5 support. But they resolved it.

No.

Excellent.

No.

Pretty straightforward. The first generation of Big-IP we had, we did a crossover heartbeat cable, but our current one just uses a switched network.

Great product for the money. But they can get really expensive, so get what meets your needs. They do have some expensive extras like GTM, which has both hardware and licensing costs for multiple datacenters.

Citrix, NetScaler.

Check with your IT staff and developers and agree on your needs, and buy accordingly. VM instances are now also available. They don’t have an end-to-end analytics package yet (supposedly in development), to troubleshoot users' experience to the back end nodes. (Citrix offers a product called MAS).