F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

I use F5 BIG-IP LTM to balance the load across multiple servers hosting a website or web application, ensuring none get overwhelmed. It is handy for ensuring that services like my email server or database stay available and responsive, even if one server goes down. Plus, it is not just for web traffic; it can manage traffic for any TCP or UDP-based service, like FTP or SIP.

The value and impact of using F5 BIG-IP LTM for application delivery control in our organization are significant. It ensures the availability, stability, and reliability of our applications, ultimately contributing to smooth operations and enhanced user experience.

One area for improvement with F5 BIG-IP LTM could be its pricing, which some may find on the higher side. Lowering costs could make the solution more accessible to a wider range of organizations.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for about six years.

It is a stable solution.

F5 BIG-IP LTM is a scalable solution, especially when deployed as a virtual machine. You can increase resources and licenses as needed, providing flexibility for growth. However, with physical appliances, scalability may be limited by hardware and license constraints.

The technical support is excellent.

Setting up F5 BIG-IP LTM is generally straightforward. In a Windows environment, initial setup might take around thirty minutes, with additional time depending on specific needs and applications. The deployment process involves configuring nodes and tools for each server and application and setting up load balancing. Additional features like compression and caching profiles can be configured as needed. Once configured, it is typically self-loading, making ongoing management easier.

The initial investment in F5 BIG-IP LTM has been worthwhile for our organization.

The licensing cost for F5 BIG-IP LTM is typically on a yearly basis, with options for one-year or three-year terms. It is quite expensive.

In our organization, we use F5 BIG-IP LTM for local balancing and traffic management. It helps us evenly distribute incoming traffic across our servers, ensuring our applications like Tobe and DNS run smoothly. Plus, it handles traffic for other services, like STV, effectively managing our network flow.

F5 BIG-IP LTM has been crucial in enhancing application delivery and optimizing network traffic. Its robust features ensure that applications are delivered efficiently and reliably. From load balancing to SSL offloading, it handles tasks seamlessly, making applications run smoothly.

The features of F5 BIG-IP LTM that are most crucial for ensuring high availability, performance, and application optimization are its load balancing capabilities, SSL offloading, and traffic acceleration through compression.

The security capabilities of F5 BIG-IP LTM, such as SSL offloading and firewall services, are extremely valuable to us. 

As a system administrator, I find the F5 BIG-IP LTM interface very user-friendly and intuitive. It simplifies complex tasks, making management easier. Compared to other vendors, it stands out for its ease of use. Plus, its analytics features streamline monitoring and decision-making.

My advice to new users is that if you are considering using F5 BIG-IP LTM for application delivery control and firewall capabilities, I would advise starting with a clear understanding of your organization's needs and objectives. Evaluate how F5 BIG-IP LTM aligns with your requirements, considering factors like scalability, performance, and security features. Additionally, explore alternative solutions like F5 ASM or FortiWeb to ensure you choose the best fit for your specific use case.

Overall, I would rate F5 BIG-IP LTM as a nine out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for reverse processing applications and services. 

Our organization greatly benefited from having a reliable and always-accessible F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). The customization options have especially come in handy, and we can modify, insert or remove the header. 

The most valuable feature is iRules.

The area for improvement would be analytical capabilities and configurations in LTM. For example, I want to know the end-to-end processes. If the traffic comes to the virtual servers without taking a wide shot, I would like to see the reason for the latency. The analytics should provide insight into latency across various traffic routes and virtual servers. The additional features in the next release should be real-time analytical capabilities.

I have used F5 BIG-IP LTM for 12 years.

It is a stable product. There have not been any issues with stability, and I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

In terms of scalability, there are some limitations on the architecture level in F5. For example, F5 has a limit of eight Virtual Control Planes (VCPs) per hardware configuration. It means expansion and scalability require additional hardware resources. I would rate scalability a five out of five. Only I am involved with this solution at my company.

The customer service and support team are experts, but I have faced difficulty with response time and resolution time. They need to have more workforce to deal with clients’ resolutions.

Positive

I have been using the F5 BIG-IP LTM for 12 years and have not felt compelled to look at alternatives.

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM is straightforward. It is user-friendly and takes around 30 minutes to set up. A beginner could set it up. You just follow the documentation.

The product is deployed on-premise.

I definitely have seen an increase in ROI.

I use a yearly subscription, which is the most expensive one now compared to its competitors.

I would rate the pricing a one out of ten. It is the most expensive solution out there. 

I also evaluated Cisco and Citrix. I evaluated the F5 based on its stability, customization and reliability. No other product can match it.

Users should keep their individual needs in mind before deciding whether to opt for this solution, considering the applications that need delivering, if load balancing is necessary or if an ADC is required. Such questions can help users make the right choice.

I would rate F5 LTM a ten out of ten. 

We're offering services to citizens who access them over the internet, and we use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for load balancing between many physical servers or backend servers.

I like that F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a product that comes with valuable features, but what stands out from all features is load balancing.

An area for improvement in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is troubleshooting on the command line, which should be more graphical.

Another area for improvement is that it's a high-priced product.

What I want to see in the product's next release is more analytics.

I've worked with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for about five years, and I'm still using the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is stable, so I'm rating it nine out of ten.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a scalable product, but my company has yet to try scaling it because there's no need.

The technical support for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is responsive. F5 has a beneficial knowledge base that allows my team to solve many problems by consulting the knowledge base.

I'd rate support eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was straightforward, so I'd rate its setup as nine out of ten.

It took a few days to deploy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) because the company had a lot of applications.

My company set up the hardware, configured the network parameters, then tested the product on one application before applying it to all applications.

We used a consultant to deploy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

I found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an expensive product. The costs would depend on the appliance and infrastructure size. However, my company didn't have to pay extra to use additional features.

As F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very pricey, I'd rate its pricing as two out of ten.

I'm working with ADC products, particularly with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

A total of five people deployed F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for my company. Three were internal, in particular, engineers, and two were consultants.

The solution requires maintenance when my company has a new application to publish and when, at times, there's a need to reset the backend configuration.

My company has many F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) users, with four people in charge of the administration and management of the product, though there's a plan to replace it because it will be EOL. The company is still prospecting and looking for alternatives, such as Barracuda or Fortinet.

I'd tell anyone looking to implement F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) that it's a good product, but its only problem is pricing.

My F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) rating is eight out of ten.

My company is a customer.

In the last two years, the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager implementations for a client had pointers, primarily ones pointing inwards to the onsite cloud-type systems, but they also did have pointers to some cloud-service-based instances as well. So it was actually doing a bit of hybrid. 

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager has improved the load balancing systems of organizations I've worked for in the past. 

The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager features I find the most valuable are the load balancing, the rest of the cell offload capabilities, and some of their security future capabilities.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is sometimes a bit cumbersome to deal with some builds, although that's gotten significantly better over the years. 

There is also room for improvement in the integration between security set features that were available on their security tools to work more seamlessly with some of their load balancing functionality. It works well, but I would personally think they could improve it. 

Simplifying the user interface would be nice to see as well. 

I started using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager probably about a decade ago. I have been using it on and off ever since. The last experience I had working with them was more from a planning perspective. Previously, I had not only done planning, architecture, and design, but the actual implementation.

I've been very impressed. Once you get it working, it's been very stable.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is scalable. That's one of the reasons I always went for it. Some of the clients I have worked with have been Fortune 100 companies with thousands and thousands of servers they needed front-ended.

Some of these sites had multiple thousands of web instances that needed to be load balanced. We were also doing both local and global load balancing. We'd use a global load balancer that would point to local load balancing that would port it out within a specific data center.

These clients had millions of end users. I believe that nearly all of those organizations ended up increasing their load balancing platform environment.

The tech support we got from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager directly was pretty good.

Before using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, I evaluated Citrix, Cisco, and several others. No other solution ever came up to quite the specs that we were looking for in terms of flexibility, capabilities, integrations, and ease of implementation. The big battle was whether or not to go with Cisco. The product is good and it integrates well with router platforms. However, with Cisco, you lose a slot in your chassis and it's kind of expensive to lose and the solution is not as good. It is not as flexible. Of course, Cisco lost the market in the end. 

The initial F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager setup is fairly complex. Granted, I wasn't working with discrete products. I haven't worked with any of the F5 discrete units. It's all been modular chassis-based for me. That gave me a lot more flexibility because I could put multiple instances; it's a much better bang for your buck and a lot more flexibility for large architectural implementation, which is really all I've ever done with it.

The instances I've built in the past had 25 to 30 segments, each having hundreds of servers. I have not done anything small-scale. One of our migration changes alone took 45 nights. 

The deployments were primarily done in-house. I would basically order and buy it. I would come up with the architectural designs for the network, work with some of the web server folks and some of the server people, and we would come up with a list of what was needed, which was usually thousands of things. Then, I would just develop an architectural model that would use the products.

In each instance that we deployed F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager from scratch, it was a return on investment that was positive in the eyes of the clients we were working with.

The biggest advice I would give about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is: to make sure you are aware of what your options are and what your own environment is. If you are a cloud-based environment, there is not much value in the local, load balancing. You would need to go with a cloud-based type load balancing capability, whether it is based on a fixed solution, like an F5, Avi, Citrix, or one of the cloud-based platforms. But, if you are still in an in-shop environment, there is much value to deploying it locally.

Overall, in terms of performance, on a scale of one to 10, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would give F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager an eight. 

It is for internal load balancing of servers.

It provides load balancing. So, it potentially brings some performance improvement and high availability. If one server goes down, there is a seamless transition to the other one. 

The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable.

Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features.

It has been quite a few years. We might have been using it for six to eight years.

It has been stable and reliable. It has been working well for us.

It is scalable, but we didn't really need to scale. It met all the performance requirements we had. So, we had no issues where we were not able to add something.

Currently, its usage is quite low, but it's not because of the product. It's because of how our company works. In other words, how much we need to use it. It's not used a lot, and we don't plan to expand its usage.

We did open some tickets, and usually, it was a very good experience.

For load balancing, we previously had Cisco solutions. We had CSS and then Application Control Engine (ACE). We switched because they stopped that service. It was end-of-life, and Cisco discontinued that range.

It was straightforward. I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the ease of setup. 

There were no issues or obstacles, and its deployment was pretty fast. We had to do preparation of all the surroundings, such as the VLAN or IP assignment, but the deployment itself was just a couple of hours.

We have a managed service provider, and they hired a consultant. We had some help there, but that was not just because of LPM. We also had other modules of F5. It was our initial or first experience with F5, and there were also other things to be migrated, which were much more complex than the LPM module. That's why the consultant was there.

For deployment, there was one person deploying it. For maintenance, we have a managed service provider. So, we have a team of people, but they're also looking at other devices and not just F5.

It was probably a one-time purchase and then you have maintenance, but I don't have the details on that. We bought what they called the Best bundle at the time, which pretty much included all of the modules. There was probably no additional cost afterward.

There were evaluations. There were Citrix NetScaler and Application Delivery Controller from A10 Networks, but in the end, F5 was chosen because of the virtualization environment that we were using at the time. We were using VMware, and we are still using it. They had better support for the VMware VDI solution. They were able to act as a gateway for the VMware VDI.

One piece of advice would be that if you are not that much concerned with performance or you definitely don't need physical hardware, you can go for a virtual edition. It might save you the migration effort when the hardware is end-of-life. 

If you need a load balancer, go for it. We didn't have any hurdles or obstacles. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to balance traffic. 

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is expensive. Pricing needs to be improved. 

I have been using the solution for five to eight years. 

The solution is stable. 

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a scalable solution. 

I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

We are using F5 BIG-IP LTM for our application which is a reverse proxy. We use it for availability, and to process the application because it is used in the financial industry.

The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP LTM is it helps our delivery team to make policies and rules for application.

The user interface of F5 BIG-IP LTM is old and could improve.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately five years.

I rate the stability of F5 BIG-IP LTM a nine out of ten.

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.

This solution is best suited for medium to large-sized businesses in the finance and telecommunications industries.

I rate the scalability of F5 BIG-IP LTM a nine out of ten.

The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is not good.

I rate the support from F5 BIG-IP LTM a five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM is simple because our project is not complicated. The implementation took approximately three days.

I rate the initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM a seven out of ten.

The price of F5 BIG-IP LTM could improve.

I rate the scalability of F5 BIG-IP LTM a ten out of ten.

This is a good solution, but it is expensive. I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM an eight out of ten.

F5 BIG-IP LTM is used for delivering applications and protecting the application from web attacks.

F5 BIG-IP LTM can improve on the SSL loading which includes the authentication of certificates. Although, most of these issues have been solved there are still some issue that persists.

In a feature release, it would be helpful to have real-time packet features in the GUI.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately two years.

I have clients that have approximately 5,000 users using the solutions and others with 40,000 users.

When we increase the services we have to then increase the usage of the solution, we put more virtual F5 devices in the cloud.

The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP LTM is straightforward. The full deployment took approximately two to three days.

I used one person for the deployment of F5 BIG-IP LTM because it is easy to do.

There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket with the support.

The second option is a subscription model on the cloud. When I have a project that will only one year. I purchase a subscription for one year only. It would work for the whole year and after we can shut it down because there is no need for it.

My advice to others is to have a good staff who understand the technology. If someone understands the technology, that will make life easy for them or their organization. I cannot say that technology is difficult, but technology is very critical when you put it in your environment. Having good staff who can manage that solution makes life a lot easier.

I rate F5 BIG-IP LTM a nine out of ten.