F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

LTM.

We can load balance the request to servers, which was the main reason we bought the product.

I think the logging could be improved.

Two years.

No.

No.

I have never used F5 technical support.

No.

No, it was simple.

Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing.

No, straight to F5.

Stable product. It also offers a virtual edition which comes in handy if you have a VMware environment.

This product has helped us build robust solutions for what my company does.

We are fond of the load balancing feature for DNS and servers. Also, these can help you natting/hiding the real IP.

I have been working on the LTM and GTM lines. Both of the products are awesome. I would consider the Wide IP and ZoneRunner features of GTM extremely useful. 

For the overall product, I would say provisioning is a good feature. There are other modules, which are good and people might want to try, such as APM and ASM. They are used for firewall and SSL VPN.

The only area that has room for improvement would be pricing.

Other than that, the v11 clustering is a new technology they have brought in that does not require improvement. They are the leader in the space.

We did not find any stability issues while working on it. 

Bugs are part of any solution and they are fixed with every release, as with any vendor.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

We used to work with support three years back and it was not that great then. Hopefully, the situation has now improved.

Technical Support:

We did not require much technical support, as the product has good documentation. However, the experience with support as compared to other vendors was not excellent, but usable.

Regarding load balancing, this was our first product.

If you do not understand the design of this product, initial setup is tricky. If you do understand it, initial setup is straightforward.

This was implemented by an in-house team.

With the new pricing model, ROI was low, hence we switched.

This product is costly from a licensing perspective considering its competitors. This is why it lost a rating point from me.

If your IT budget can support it, go for it.

Attend a training class before trying to deploy it, or at least refer to online videos on their portal, as this will make it fairly easy for you.

It is one of the best and easiest load balancing solutions. The product was designed to allow newbies to configure it, and it is properly documented.

I think the product is a good product. I think where they can improve is in the licensing. It's quite expensive. They could make it more aligned with the business model than with the hardware.

I have been using F5 for about two years.

It is a stable product but sometimes we have some issues. I have other products that are competitors of F5, and they are also good. The performance of F5 so far is good.

Usually, because we are responsible for providing high availability, we run our architecture with redundancy. Usually, for example, when I have F5, I have a couple of F5s, the active one and the standby one. Today, I had problems. I don't know what happened; it couldn't reload automatically. The other one assumed that I have problems with my infrastructure. That's unfortunately the life of an operations guy.

It is scalable and should meet our future requirements.

Technical support is OK. Usually, you don't have direct support from the vendor. You have intermediating in the middle.

The setup is not straightforward. To set up this product, you must know how to do it. Otherwise, you can't do it. It's not plug and play.

They could buy it but there are other choices such as Cisco ACE products, as well. We have it. They are also good. F5 are good. Usually, I'm not locked into one vendor.

The reality is our bookkeeping department unfortunately has a problem with them. Because of that, I have had some issues concerning getting services from the vendor.

My team uses F5 for two main purposes. The first purpose is load balancing. F5 is very good at load balancing. It allows you to set up monitors so it can easily detect if the systems' load balancing is actually up. In addition, we use F5 for intrusion detection on some externally facing pieces of the applications that I support.

We like the capability to combine the content switching with the intrusion prevention and adding the security roles, so we can expose certain sub-pieces outside without exposing everything.

Another feature that we like is how they integrate nicely with the Oracle PeopleSoft application, and since that's one of my main focuses, I really like that they have the built-in integration.

I have been really happy with what they have been doing.

They could improve the synchronization between their main site and the failover site. Sometimes, we run into issues where it does not sync well, so I would like to see that improved.

The synchronization does works fairly well. However, if I were to make changes,  I would make it easier to start the sync process. For example, once you get the changes pending you have to click inside to tell it to sync. It would be nice if it would offer a button to click on for the sync if it is only going one direction. Another feature which would be nice in a sync is to have the ability to compare if there are changes on both sides, and if there are conflicts, it would allow you to choose which to apply. Otherwise, it would sync both directions at the same time.

We haven't had any major downtime. The solution comes with a high availability situation, and I've never seen a situation where it was down, because even when you do the patch, you patch one side and then the other, and so always one side at least is up. I haven't noticed it to be down.

It is a scalable solution. I think it will meet our future requirements. We started using it when Cisco announced that they were no longer doing their content switch and we've been implementing it a lot. It's one of the current focuses that our company is doing in the infrastructure side of things.

Customer Service:

I usually go via the online support, which is very good.

Technical Support:

They have been very quick to respond to all of the needs that we've had. If you want ad-hoc support. They also provide professional services that you can purchase as well.

I got involved after the initial setup was done, so I can't say if that was complex or not. The pieces that we're doing where we're setting up content switches and stuff like that, that seems to be really straightforward. I didn't even have to take training to work on it!

I have not actually used any of the competitor products.

I would recommend that they really look at it. It's a good product. It really helps. Initially, I would also recommend that they consider using some consulting help from their firm to get it set up, because like I said, I wasn't involved there, but I know we did use that.

When I look to work with a vendor like this, I look for vendors that are responsive, certainly ones that have a good reputation, and ones that when you get their products, they actually do what they tell you they're going to do.

I rated F5 Big-IP three and a half stars, because I seldom rate anything five stars. The F5 interface is easy to use, but not everything is intuitive. Some training is necessary to understand how everything works together.

Central solution to control traffic or web applications (besides NG Firewall).

• Easy administration
• A lot of features
• Scriptable (iRules and REST API)

I have some experience with other load balancing providers. The BIG-IP’s interface is more intuitive than other GUIs. It is well structured, not overloaded, and does not have too many gimmicks.

The ASM administration is quite complex. I am a technical GUI expert (not UI). They did improve the ASM administration in each version, but added new features, too. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas.

I have not yet encountered any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good. I have had nothing to complain about up until now.

I previously used a different solution. We switched because the hardware was too old, and the other vendor did not have the same set of features.

Initial setup was straightforward. We were up and running in three hours.

Take a look at the modules that you are going to use. Look into the best bundles for them.

Before choosing this product, I compared it with Radware. Cisco was already off the market, and Citrix was not as big as it is today.

Use the community and DevCentral.

iRules are so helpful in meeting our complex application’s architecture in case of routing. The requests have to be routed according to the cookies and headers of the host name itself. And also we can log the details, which helps us a lot in troubleshooting.

Using the “repeat” option when creating multiple virtual servers, we are able to create as many virtual IPs as we can as we go. This reduces a lot of configuration time.

My organization has various kinds of routing requirements and we have achieved it using F5’s iRules. Also with different load balancing options, many applications have benefited a lot.

Active-Standby sync has to be made automatic.

All of the F5 boxes have an Active-Standby configuration. Users need to make changes in the Active box, but often users by mistake make changes in the Standby box. This creates problems when syncing between Active and Standby. There should be some indication from the F5 tool to avoid such mistakes.

I have used it for the past year.

All of the support I require is available on the internet.

The BigIP F5 tool is applicable to all types of infrastructure. I would recommend this tool to others.

LTM is a full-reverse proxy, handling connections from clients. The F5 LTM uses Virtual Services (VSs) and Virtual IPs (VIPs) to configure a load balancing setup for a service. We have used this feature in many applications, especially for HTTP and HTTPS.

There is room for improvement with their firmware quality control. A bug in the firmware caused hardware failures.

I have been using it for one year.

Unfortunately, we faced hardware failures and a lot of other problems, as well.

With the hardware failure problem, we faced a management problem via the GUI. We could only manage the device through the CLI. The issue was caused by a firmware bug.

In addition, health check statistics like CPU and memory utilization were not correct.

It is F5’s responsibility to solve those problems, and I don’t know how they can release firmware with such bugs to their customers.

F5 support can be rated low on the scale, as there is a problem regarding handover between their engineers when we follow-up with them about some technical cases.

I recommend considering NetScaler, as well.

We mainly use the following F5 modules 

ISP environments:

• CGNAT
• DNS firewall
• Load balancer
• WAF to be sold as a service to their clients

Enterprise environments:

• Web application firewall
• Load balancer
• Application policy manager
• Fraud protection (Web and mobile)
• DDoS (on-premise, and cloud-based)

iRule: It's a great feature that helped us multiple times have an advantage over competition (during PoCs) performing some traffic control/management functions that are not supported out of the box. Use Case: One client was deploying a new web app, where video/chat Traffic is configured over the SOCKS protocol. We used iRule to disable the WAF Inspection when a SOCKS protocol packet passed through (because it is not supported), and enable the WAF Inspection for all other URLs on the same Web page. (No other vendor in our region was able to provide that.)

Appliance Performance: One of the main advantages we always have over competition is in hardware performance, where the smallest F5 appliances compete with competitors’ medium to high-end appliances, while high-end devices can sit in the datacenter without risking performance degradation.

• Reporting: One of the negative things about F5 is there is no place to generate a summary/executive/detailed report about everything happening on the box, especially for WAF & APM events. The only way to get some kind of report is enable the AVR module, and manually export the data required into PDF/XLS documents.
• GUI interface: F5 appliances lack a standard dashboard page, where it shows a summary for all events on the boxes. (This is usually available with firewalls & IPSs...) In the F5 GUI, we have to perform multiple steps to reach the required info, but there is no simple (and attractive) GUI interface when compared to some other WAF competitors.
• Event notifications

I have not encountered any stability issues. It is a very stable product, even in big, high-load deployments. What I mean is that all F5 Hardware appliances are very stable and does not cause any performance degradation or failure when it has a high load (Of course a supported load).

We have deployment for different modules of F5 (LTM, ASM, CGNAT...) in Data Centers and in Telco's Public network, and we have never heard any complaints or of issues from our clients regarding the performance. - no packet drops, delays or disconnections.

We only encountered issues with small appliances, 2000s, when we needed to add more than two modules...

Technical support is great.

We previously used Cisco ACE (for load balancing & WAF). We switched because the Cisco ACE solution features were very basic compared to F5. Plus, the solutions line was discontinued several years ago.

Initial setup is straightforward; easy deployment with lots of available online documentation.

F5 Prices are considered higher then competitive solutions, but performance & features are worth the extra money.

Over our year of engagement with F5, we evaluated multiple products from other vendors and competed with many others, and we always found F5 products to be our first and best choice to advise our customers to use, with respect to:

• Performance, protection, stability, scalability
• Being modular based, for a better long term investment

F5 is dedicated to a specific technology line, which makes it the best of breed in the application delivery market. F5's main business is always focused on application delivery, whether in availability, security, or performance.

F5 is a very stable and recommended product, whether needed on the internet edge or inside the data center. It can provide different application delivery solutions, such as:

• Load balancing
• Web application firewall
• Access policy manager
• Web fraud
• DDoS protection.

I rate it nine out of 10 because we are an F5 partner, and we have been selling and deploying different F5 modules for different industry vectors. In any deployment we always had a great customer experience, mainly in the following areas:

• performance stability 
• overall stability
• rich features in the appliances, that customers can benefit from.

It's a modular-based appliance. You can double the performance specs by a license upgrade, and regarding features you can add a license for additional modules (E.g.: Web application firewall, application policy manager, fraud, DDoS). In general, for a client doing a proper ROI over five years, F5 appliances become their preferred choice.