F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

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.

I basically work for the solutioning only, so I've been migrating the F5 from the existing chassis to the new chassis for the last three years. Before that, I was a part of operations so I was working to support any incidents on F5. 

We have multiple solutions we can deploy through the F5.

The basic load balancing is acting as a round-robin. Other features we can use are based on the application team's requirements. F5 is not only basically giving solutions based on the network background, but it's also compatible based on the application level. Therefore, whenever the application team has a specific requirement, we can tweak it and we can provide the solution over the LTM.

For load balancing, for related solutioning, it is user-friendly. We have a good knowledge base over the F5 knowledge base. 

The stability is good.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support and documentation are excellent. 

For right now, I don't have anything I would suggest in terms of improvements.

I worked mainly on the CLI. Working on the CLI on the operations level or on the configuration level is sometimes a bit complex to understand. You have to have a good background in Linux so that you can perform the necessary solutioning or operations through the CLI. Whenever we want to investigate something we need to use the CLI, however, the CLI level troubleshooting and the solutioning, it is a little bit complicated. We have a limitation when it comes to the GUI. That said, I have found that we can do much better analysis with troubleshooting over the CLI.

Scaling up is complex. 

It's expensive. 

We need to have good security features available. It's something I still need to explore more, however.

I started using the solution six years ago.

It is quite stable. I never faced any issues. I would rate it ten out of ten for the LTM. It's a very stable product.

For scaling, there has to be a lot of planning when we need to scale up F5. It is a bit complex.

We cannot easily scale up the LTM. We cannot put an additional box into the production without any downtime with the user experience. So adding the box or scaling up has to be done with proper planning.

We have an extensive network of users across Office 365, SharePoint, custom applications, Skype for Business, et cetera.

Some customers who have been using the solution for the last six years are wanting to migrate or wanting to upgrade their chassis to the newer version. It is typically if they have a station-hungry application to deploy, like Teams, where this is quite a useful product. With F5, the transition is quite smooth.

I don't do any operation-related stuff. I don't deal with them too much.

Neutral

We also use many Cisco products.

I directly got the opportunity to work on the F5. I didn't work with any other vendor.

I worked on projects that were both difficult and simple. 

I remember I was working closely with the application team where they wanted to migrate their platform with zero downtime. They wanted to migrate the user data from one SharePoint to another SharePoint without any downtime. We used a specific i-rule. That i-rule checks the URLs and then it checks the decision as to whether to redirect the traffic to the specific node, which is the existing node, or in the new data center.

This was a kind of complex project. We had to troubleshoot when the users were getting the "page cannot be displayed" message. It was pointed out that it was an F5-related issue, however, later, when we check the per page of the node, which is behind EVIP, we tried to check the meeting URL on each node and we found that a specific node was giving the page cannot be displayed or 404 error. We learned we had to be careful about the migration of the application using the URL with zero downtime.

The main complexity was felt by the application team requirement. They wanted it in such a way that the user should not face any issues. The SharePoint migration should be from the existing infra to the new infra and should be transferred to the user. Due to that complexity, we have to work on the i-rule mainly, which was defining i-rules or providing solutions based on the URL part and it was a bit complex to do everything successfully. 

That said, on a normal application, a standard application, we have a good i-rule available over the F5, which we can use. It is only complex for custom applications.

For the standard application, it was very quick to deploy. We can deploy it in a day. If it is a complex i-rule with multiple URLs to be analyzed, or which checks the background, then it has to be tested well before being put in production. It takes longer. It takes time, based on the scope of the project and where you need to deploy.

How much help you need with maintenance depends on the scope of this project. If there is 24/7 support required in the operation, so based on the, let's say, specific DC, if we have one cluster for a specific application and additional, or two pairs of clusters or three pairs of clusters, I would say you would need three full-timers required in a day for operation-related topics. 

For solutioning, it typically depends on the scope of work, however, I would say a single full-timer can manage the solutioning. 

For complex issues we generally take a consultation from the F5, however, for the standard or medium standard application, we do it on our own. For the SharePoint migration using the complex i-rule, we took a consultation from F5.

We have seen an ROI. I would rate it five out of five in terms of the returns we've seen.

If you have LTM specifically, you can deploy multiple applications using one cluster and it will definitely be beneficial.

I'm not aware of the licensing costs. My understanding is that it is expensive. I'd rate it a four out of five in terms of the rather expensive cost.

We do pay for extra support.

I'm still one step behind the pre-sales in my current organization. I don't deal with any evaluations of other solutions. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

Currently, it's on-premises, however, we are targeting the cloud.

Sometimes we have to definitely look for external support, which is very good. They provide good support and good documentation. Once you have their help, with a good document, you can get some idea of what to do and how you can further customize the solution for other needs. For the very complex options, it's a good idea to have F5 support included at the beginning just to not waste time.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We usually use the product for load balancing, as a web server, and for web traffic.

We're hosting a website for our company, and the solution has helped a lot with load balancing. 

The load-balancing features are great. You can do several different types, depending on the application. 

The solution offers good automation. 

It's stable and reliable. 

The solution can scale.

The setup is pretty easy.

They offer good technical support.

The GUI needs improvement. They need some sort of help section in the GUI, like descriptions of certain features. There are a lot of features, and it is hard to remember what does what. Having some sort of prompt or pop-up in the GUI would help a lot. 

I've been using the solution for around six years. 

The stability and reliability are great. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. It's easy to expand. 

We have two or three users directly dealing with the solution. 

Technical support has been helpful and responsive so far. 

Positive

While I was involved in the on-premises deployment. For the cloud, I didn't have to do much. It's a pretty straightforward setup. The only complex part is building the HA since it's linked to following a certain procedure. In that case, the ease of implementation depends on the experience of the one who's going to deploy it.

Two people should be able to handle deployment. 

We have witnessed a return on investment. 

I'd rate the pricing three out of ten. It is quite expensive to scale up. 

The product can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

If a customer really wants a robust and stable load-balancing appliance, they should go for LTM.

I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

We use this product to hide true identity of our web servers from external users while balancing the loads of those external users. 

For load balancing, we have various load balancing method. We can define these methods at the node or pool level. 

We are retail users and have lot of websites for online businesses to prevent attacks. On those sites, there is a WAF module that we also use, which prevents attacks on it. 

It acts as a reverse proxy for our web servers, and we can use certificate to protect from attackers and send encrypted traffic to F5 which then decrypt and passes to the internal server after encrypting again using a server-side certificate or sending in plain form.

It has helped a lot to protect our organization from external attacks, especially XSS or XSRF types of attacks. 

It serves as a reverse proxy for our web servers which takes the request from the internet users on F5 public-facing IP using an encrypted connection and then it decrypts the packet using a client-side certificate. We use server-side certificates to encrypt the traffic and send it to the server. Internet users never know what the real server IP is. It does NATing to hide the identity and it has an ASM module to protect it from web attacks.

There are a lot of good things this solution has, including:

The LTM module helps to load balance the traffic among the internal web server in our case using round robin and least connection method.

The ASM module prevents web attacks and protects our web servers.

The irule feature is used to write these irules to redirect the traffic or sometimes prevent automated attacks such as through BOTs where the distinction between real and fake users becomes increasingly tricky.

Its virtual servers have the option to configure other things to increase the speed of serving requests like the use of a persistence profile.

The major drawback is it has lot of options nested inside, and each option has a lot of options. I'm not sure who might be using all those options or even some (limited) good options. They should pare everything down.

It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it. Creating virtual servers, managing pools, and nodes until it is working on WAF side of it becomes difficult while writing the irules.

Another drawback is we are using a physical appliance. It becomes very slow and unresponsive. Even logs cannot load on the box to troubleshoot. It overwrites the logs. They need to do something in log storage locally on this box in the next release.

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.

All the cyber security vendors and their products need improvement, including F5 and this product. No one is 100% secured, because attacks are more sophisticated now, and the hackers have become more advanced.

Recently, I've seen one of the attacks on this particular network, where they managed to bypass its multi-factor authentication. They were able to bypass that level of security, and they managed to get into the network.

Every cyber security vendor needs to be proactive. No one is perfect, so even the rank one cyber security vendors should also keep their eyes open all the time.

It would also be better if F5 provided free product training for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), so end customers could have more awareness and understanding of the product, so they'll know how to use it.

Our level of requirements, usage, and scalability are being met by this product. If we needed additional features, or if we needed additional licenses, all we need to do is just buy the additional features or licenses, so we currently don't have any additional features we'd like to be included in the next version of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

My experience with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a total of four years now. We have customers, e.g. from the government, who prefer this solution. We also propose it to them because they have a bigger environment, compared to the environment size of private companies. We have customers from the government, e.g. from the Department of Communication.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is scalable and secure, so we propose this solution to customers with bigger environments, e.g. those in the government.

I'm rating F5 technical support a nine out of ten.

We used Fortinet, but what we were getting from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was always more than what we got from Fortinet, even when using FortiWeb and Forti WAF cloud as a service, and even when considering the functionality of each product.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is more complex to implement. Implementation of this product would be much easier if you have the right service, e.g. consultation services included, support from the distributor or directly from the vendor itself, or a certified partner. Having consultation and support will help make it much easier for the end customer during implementation, but the implementation process for this product is more complex than Fortinet.

The cost is high for this product, so small customers, e.g. those in a private bank, won't be able to afford F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), and they also don't really need the kind of support and functionality that this product gives.

For customers who are in the government, we propose F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) despite its cost being high, because they'll really need it. They host their applications in the cloud, and in private data centers, e.g. private cloud services, so they'll need the kind of protection that this product provides.

It depends on customer. Whenever we see that customers can't afford, or the environment is smaller, we propose Fortinet, or some other solution that's cheaper than Fortinet. We don't propose F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to them.

I was able to evaluate Fortinet.

We have a partnership with Fortinet, as a reseller of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and other F5 products. We are also a reseller of Cisco and Forcepoint products, though we just started with Forcepoint, so we haven't been doing much with their products currently.

My advice to users of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), including people who are thinking of implementing this product, is that they need to have product awareness. What we are seeing in our government customers is that they don't have awareness, in particular, they don't know what they're using, which is why they're having issues. They need to understand the product first, and they need to go and get the training first, but they are hesitant to pay for the training.

Unlike Fortinet who provides free training, F5 doesn't. Ever since the pandemic, Fortinet has provided free training, but certification is not free. If F5 can provide free training for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), that would be better.

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