F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

The solution is used for deploying applications.

The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP LTM is the operating system. It is nicely designed and orchestrated. The solution has all the features that are necessary for medium to large-sized enterprises would need to ensure their application are available throughout the globe. The LTM and DTM features combined provide a great service to organizations for presenting around the world which includes load balancing. 

If there are any problems with the applications during integration they can be managed well with the solutions' ability to provide visibility.

The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for approximately 15 years.

The stability of F5 BIG-IP LTM is great.

50 percent of my customers are using this solution.

F5 BIG-IP LTM is a scalable solution.

I have not needed technical support from F5 BIG-IP LTM.

If you are an expert in F5 BIG-IP LTM then the solution is simple to implement. If someone is new to implementing the solution it is difficult.

The length of time it takes to do the deployment depends on the size of the network it is being deployed in.

We do the implementation of the solution.

This solution comes with a standard license, and there are also extra licenses that can be obtained. The licenses are purchasable for durations of one, two, three, and five years. The hardware is something to consider when purchasing

I recommend this solution to my customers.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a nine 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.

BIG-IP LTM is mainly used to load balance applications.

BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration. It's also very flexible because you can use iRules to manipulate the traffic.

I've been using BIG-IP LTM for over ten years.

BIG-IP LTM is quite stable - sometimes there are security vulnerabilities, but they inform us when a patch is needed. 

BIG-IP LTM is scalable - once F5 is installed, you can keep adding servers behind it.

BIG-IP LTM's technical support is good - once you log a case with them, the support is quite prompt and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex - it's quite flexible in terms of configuration, but the person configuring it needs to understand the application side, the network side, and the server. The speed of deployment depends on the application requirement and the application deployment cycle.

BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product, so it's quite expensive and isn't affordable for all customers. F5's licensing is based on modules, so there are separate charges depending on which features you want.

Before implementing BIG-IP LTM, you should understand your expectations and requirements, especially from the application team. Putting BIG-IP LTM into a not-so-critical environment would be very expensive, so you may want to consider more medium-range solutions that can do the same job. I would give BIG-IP LTM a rating of ten out of ten.

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.

We use it for server management and application traffic, that is, to load balance between traffic for applications coming from their service. Users coming in are then able to have their traffic go to the service that has the suitable resources or adequate resources.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition.

It also provides lower latency.

It would be good to have better traffic and better data. It would be nice to have more granularity to see packets in terms of the header details, the analytics, etc. It would be nice if that was also part of it and to have analytics added to the traffic.

I've been using it for two years.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is pretty stable. It's one of the most stable products that I know, when it comes to load balancing and traffic.

It is very scalable. We have thousands of users.

The technical support is top notch.

It is pretty easy to set up.

Because there were other parties involved, the deployment took us about a week. Normally, it takes a couple of hours.

We did it in-house.

I would advise you to go for it because it's one of the top three solutions in my opinion. I would rate it at seven on a scale from one to ten.

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for the web application firewall and a load balancing system. We are using it in a government project.

There are not very many areas for improvement, but the price is high.

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

I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to be stable.

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

We have approximately nine people using this solution in my organization.

We have only opened up two support tickets with the support and on both occasions, they provided a good service.

The initial setup of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) was complex and could be made easier. The full process took approximately three weeks.

We used consultants for the implementation of the solution. 

We have 10 to 12 managers supporting this solution.

The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) a seven out of ten.

I am using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for load balancing. For example, I create the virtual server, and in there we have a pool and member server. This is used for simple load balancing.

We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing.

When I was using the solution I was using the basic functions and I found it difficult to handle some of the more advanced features. I needed assistance from my IT department or the vendors themself. There should be more workshops are places to gain knowledge on how to use the solution. You need specific skill sets to use it.

I have used F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager(LTM) within the past 12 months.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a stable and reliable solution.

Our whole IT department is using the solution with some application teams. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in the IT department.

When there is an issue it is first looked at by our internal team rather a ticket being opened directly with the vendor. I open the tickets to our internal team and if they cannot solve the issue, they will escalate to the vendor. The technical support from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is good.

We did not do the implementation ourselves.

It is important to know how the solution works. For example, how to set up the interface, routing, pools, and the implementation steps. After the basic configurations, you will understand you may need or want to try to learn more of the features, such as the layers of the SNI. It is ideal to start with the very basic implementation first. We have been doing the day-to-day operation.

When it comes to troubleshooting, it is important to know how to isolate the problem, analyze it, and be fast to solve them when it appears.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a six out of ten.