F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

For my clients, the primary use cases include load balancing, both for server and link load balancing.

We have used it to link two or three servers and make them communicable from outside. It works well as a load balancer.

There is room for improvement in terms of stability. The F5 BIG-IP LTM allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single appliance. However, if one of those virtual portions fails, it can cause issues and impact the overall stability of the solution.

I have been working with this solution for four years. I have worked with F5 as a system integrator, partner, and MSP.

It is a stable solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten. Rather than having separate appliances for each virtual machine, the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) allows multiple virtual machines to run on one appliance. However, if one of those virtual portions is no longer available, it can cause issues.

It is scalable. I would say it's around eight or nine out of ten. Our clients are at the enterprise level. 

The customer service and support is good. 

The initial setup is easy. I would rate the initial installation a nine out of ten, one being very difficult and ten being very easy.

We installed the solution in a web-based environment and have implemented it in two data centers, one located in New Jersey and the other in a different location. We have used F5 for both firewall load balancing and link load balancing. We have two sets of F5 deployed at each location. 

We completed the installation within a week with the help of a team of five people. At present, a team of five is managing and maintaining the solution in the data center and for the local portion.

It is cheaper than the average on the market. I would rate it as a five since it is in the middle range, with ten being the most expensive. It is good, and the price is reasonable. 
Moreover, I have only worked on five or six devices and have not dealt with licensing rules. However, in my previous job as a system integrator, I did work on local installations, which were relatively quick and inexpensive.

In my opinion, the Radware product is also good. F5 and Alteon products are equally good, so I would rate them an eight.

I would recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight 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.

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.

It is a stable product from a stable company. Recently, they have been more focused on security as well.

Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution.
F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust.

I've worked with this solution for about two years.

It's a stable product.

It is scalable.

In my experience, I have received excellent support from F5 for any technical issues that I or my customers have faced. I have had no issues with technical support.

The initial setup is easy.

The price is little bit on higher side, compared to the cost of NGINX.

If you are a partner, then I would recommend that you go through the partner portal videos because they have very good training videos that help you to learn the product and technology when it comes to implementation. It helps a lot with implementation, and they have detailed documentation that explains the implementation process step by step. Once you go through that, you'll definitely have a clear understanding of the implementation process. Without that, it may be a little bit tricky for you to complete the implementation in a smooth manner.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at eight on a scale from one to ten.

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.

The primary use case includes load balancing to serve application servers and basic web application firewall solutions. Our customers use it for that purpose.

It takes the load off the application servers allowing them to operate efficiently.

The solution is trusted as it has too many customers and has been in operation for many years, enabling users to feel comfortable and perform at a high level. 

Additionally, features such as SSL offloading, various balancing methods, and the ability to work with HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP protocols are beneficial. Another feature of note is its high stability and reliable performance.

There are no specific areas for improvement as it is already well-resolved and doesn't require further enhancements.

I have been using the BIG-IP LTM solution for almost two years.

The solution is highly stable and reliable.

With the new version, the solution is scalable.

The technical support team is really good.

Positive

The setup is a little bit complex. That said, the documentation is helpful.

I am a part of the implementation team.

The solution brings a significant return on investment as it allows the use of many servers with high performance.

The pricing should be more flexible.

I recommend F5 BIG-IP LTM because it works stably, the support is good, and the local team is helpful.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the solution for its load balancing and web application firewall features.

The solution's valuable features are flexibility, stability, security, and performance.

The solution's hardware quality needs improvement. Also, its cloud-based anti-DDoS has limitations. It could be better.

We have been using the solution for four years.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good in some areas. Although, it could be faster.

Positive

In comparison with Barracuda, the solution has better performance.

The solution is easy to install. It takes a day to configure and requires three engineers to execute the process. Also, it requires one executive to maintain it.

The solution is good in terms of investment.

The solution is more expensive than Barracuda. We pay yearly for its support services. There are no additional costs involved apart from the standard license.

One must check the performance capacity of internal applications while using the solution, as wrong configurations lead to failure in accessing them.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) has EC, WAF, firewall, network firewall, and CGNAT in one platform.

I like the combination of ADC and WAN in the solution. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) could be a bit better in regards to the pricing.

Kemp Loadmaster is cheaper compared to F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Also, the solution's UI needs improvement.

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

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The solution's scalability is good. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Around 50-100 of our customers use the solution.

The technical support is very good.

The solution's initial setup process was quite complex. It took around a month to two for the deployment process.

Regarding the deployment process, we have to do an assessment first because it's very complex. There are so many parameters that we have to count the deployments. So, an assessment could be better before the deployment process. We have a manager and a person in charge of technical maintenance, but we usually talk to security and work with the network team.

Though I have not seen a return on investment, I can say that it is a good solution.

Our company pays for the licensing cost on a yearly basis. Also, there are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Before choosing the solution, I suggest others check their requirements to ensure work and protect your data. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.