F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

As an IT developer, mostly I use load balancing for the traffic. Currently, it's distributing the load perfectly, as per my understanding of our requirements.

It's definitely scalable and is stable as well.

The initial setup is not complex, and the technical support is fine.

I'm not very sure about the security with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). We have our own private data center, but we are going to migrate our private data center into the Azure cloud environment. Security will then be a major concern when we migrate our own whole infrastructure to the public cloud.

So, I think they should improve in terms of security because nowadays, most organizations try to build their infrastructure on public cloud.

More documentation should be uploaded because very limited documentation is available on the internet. It will also help us to understand the system before purchasing the product.

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's a stable solution.

It's definitely scalable. It's a distributed architecture and micro services, so it's scalable. In fact, we are planning to increase usage and scale horizontally.

I don't have any issues with respect to technical support; it has been fine.

The initial setup is not complex. 

If you have your own data center, then you can use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). I don't see any issues because they have been in the industry for a long time, and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very stable.

I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I am an integrator. I implement solutions for our customers.

It's straightforward deployment application delivery control. 

Our customers have a lot of services that are public, in their internal network and external public network.

They use F5 BIG-IP to publish these services in a secure manner.

They use it for publish billing system services, and some uses for their internal services, such as the DNS active directory.

F5 BIG IP is a rock-solid solution. It's a very good solution.

I am very satisfied with the quality of this product.

There is a lot of documentation available.

I'm not very familiar with the services pattern. I am still exploring the features of this solution.

I am just working with a single application, which we need to publish. I don't know how many services they are using, and what kind of services they operate.

Technical support could be improved.

I am still a bit of a novice. I have only been using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for a year.

We are currently deploying this on the service providers but dealing with the IT department for our customers.

It's an enterprise network that is servicing the internal IT traffic for our customers. This is traffic from the IT management systems, and billing systems.

All systems have bugs, and F5 is not an exception. 

In my experience, I didn't face any critical bugs that stopped the deployment. 

I don't think that F5 is worse than other vendors in this perspective.

I had some cases where I contacted technical support.

They have a good quality level of support and have helped us resolve our issues.

However, I have had a situation where I had a bad experience, but overall it's not the norm, it was just an exception.

I would compare technical support with Cisco, although I would say that Cisco is better.

Technical support could improve.

The setup of the F5 BIG-IP system is a very straightforward process. It is very well documented and is described on the vendor information systems.

They provide a lot of information on their site and on the central portal. You can even find information on YouTube. 

I am not familiar with the price of this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. I am very satisfied with it.

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

I am not the F5 administrator so I don't use all of the features. I primarily perform daily operations such as checking statistics and deploying new virtual servers.

Our deployment is not very complicated, from my point of view. The HTTP and HTTPS load balancing mechanisms are the core functionality for me. I have done things like created new virtual servers, changed the load balancing, and looked at statistics, but I have not looked into the security features, API gateways, and other features because that is the responsibility of other departments. As a pure network engineer, I think the box is performing very well.

I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing. As long as you know what you're doing, it does everything you want it to do.

Technical support is somewhat slow and could be improved.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP for the past two years.

My experience with technical support has come from two or three tickets that I have raised over the past two years. I would rate them a six or seven out of ten. I'm not sure if my colleagues have faced the same issues, but I have experienced delays in response, especially when I opened a case for iRules. It took them about a month and a half to get me to the point.

One of the reasons it took as long was because they considered this to be a problem for professional services, and not technical support. As such, it was not marked as urgent.

F5 was the first load balancer that I worked on.

The provisioning of the box from A to Z is of medium difficulty. It is not very complicated, nor very easy. I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of provisioning it for the first time.

Compared to using open-source products, the prices are not cheap.

Although we are happy with F5, we are currently evaluating NGINX and Kemp LoadMaster because our F5 boxes are approaching end-of-life. We are running them as demos, conducting a PoC for each to test and see how they run in our environment. There are several things that I have yet to test with these other products.

My understanding is that the support packages and the boxes themselves are not very cheap.

If ultimately we find that the other solutions do not meet our requirements then we will be renewing our service with F5. 

To this point, whatever we have needed has been available out-of-the-box. In our environment, we have not experienced limitations.

In summary, we are happy with the product and for me, it's ideal for HTTP and HTTPS.

Performance-wise, stability-wise, and feature-wise, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

There are many use cases. It is mainly used for local traffic management. It can also be used as an advanced firewall for an application or as a VPN policy manager.

We have cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments.

Bandwidth optimization and capacity awareness of the bandwidth are valuable features. Its video streaming capabilities are also very useful.

The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization.

It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management.

We were their partners for five years, and since last year, we are officially their distributor.

It is really awesome. You can scale from one or two servers to hundreds of servers. They have all the modules that a customer needs. You can go for on-premise or cloud deployment. You can have whatever you need.

Our clients are medium and large businesses.

They have 24/7 support. You can open a ticket directly in F5, and there is no need to use another system.

They reply very fast. They usually get back within four hours, and sometimes, you get a response immediately. They have four-tier system support.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It is just like a wizard and not complex. It takes only a few seconds.

You can buy it on a yearly basis, or you can go for a subscription. For on-premise boxes, it is just the RMA.

I would rate F5 Traffic Management Operating System a nine out of ten.

We are using it for web application firewall and load balancing features. We have its latest version.

It is stable.

Its scalability and deployment should be better. It should be more scalable, and it should be easier to deploy.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

It is stable.

It is not scalable. We have about 2,000 users in our organization.

I don't have any experience with their technical support.

We didn't use any other product.

It is neither easy nor complex. It needs experience. Fortinet is easier to deploy than this.

I did it myself. We have an IT team of 60 people.

I would recommend this solution. We plan to keep using it. 

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

We use the solution to offer load balancing to companies and especially for state and government company.

One of the best features of the solution is the operating system. Additionally, it is easy to use and has plenty of features.

The configuration is intricate and could be improved. 

For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud.

The price of the solution is sometimes expensive.

I rate F5 BIG-IP an eight out of ten.

Mostly I support my clients in relation to the product.

I am very satisfied with the product overall. 

There is never a big number of false positives or false negatives. That's the most valuable aspect of the product. 

The solution is very easy to use and easy to understand. It's quite an intuitive system.

The user interface and GUI are very good.

I find the product to be very stable. I've supported customers for two years and haven't really had an issue with the solution.

I can't say that there are any features missing. I've overall been quite happy with it.

We once had an issue related to trying to publish some exchange application to a file and we experienced some problems there, however, the incident was not really related to BIG-IP. It was likely some kind of infrastructure problem the company was experiencing.

We haven't had any big problems of note.

Technical support could be faster. It's something I'd like to see them work on in the future.

The pricing could be more reasonable.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point. 

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had an issue in years. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good. It's reliable.

Most of our clients are medium-sized entities.

For the one customer I typically deal with, there has been no need to scale or expand services. The product can be scaled by adding more licenses if necessary. That said, our clients have everything they need and have not actually done this. 

There are also add-ons that come from the ASM if a company is interested in that.

Technical support is slow and it could be faster. I had one issue once that was not very serious as it was on the Disaster Recovery Site. We were able to pull a previous version from a snapshot. However, the issue was that I was able to solve the problem myself before I even heard back from technical support. If they knew their technology, how is it that I could solve the problem faster as a person that's not as familiar with it? They need to be much faster. It could have been a much bigger problem. 

I'd say, overall, we aren't satisfied with the technical support for that reason.

I did not previously use a different product. This is my first Application Delivery Consult Solution.

The initial setup is very complex. The basic setup may be fine, however, right now I'm trying to do something in my lab environment. We've tried a few things over the years and it hasn't gotten any easier.

The costs could be lower. In a report, we found that Citrix Solutions are somehow cheaper - including in relation to encryption licensing. I cannot compare as I haven't spoken to Citrix. I don't know if it's easier or has the same (or more features). That said, I wouldn't describe this product as cheap. 

We're currently comparing F5 to Citrix. I'm not currently working with Citrix; I'm curious to see how they compare to each other. I had a presentation to a client and they just wanted some sort of comparison, which is why I began to look at Citrix.

We are resellers.

I'm a System Integrator. I have experience in virtual environments and with clients. I have some moderate experience with implementation and some bigger experience in supporting this product. I'm not an expert in the field, however, I'm trying to be.

I don't have any issues with the solution. It's pretty problem-free in general. Overall, I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

We use the solution as a proxy to our websites, load balancing all our servers as clients come onto our website and use our services. Our website provides around 15 different services. We are customers of F5 and I'm a solutions architect for telecom and network infrastructure.

The load balancing aspect is valuable to us. 

We use a limited amount of features so the biggest issue for us is the price. For what we're using, it's an expensive solution. 

We've been using this solution for 12 years. 

The solution is very stable and scales easily. Our networking team deals with the maintenance.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We had external help for implementation and I believe deployment took about two days. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

The solution is mostly used for the LTM load balancer. Recently more of our customers are using it for the web application firewall. Some of my other customers are using the GTM model also. 

My experience in selling this solution is approximately two and a half years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution depends on the sizing of the network. Generally, the scalability is quite good.

The technical support is one of the best I have seen in their field. They have been good so far.

One of the strongest areas of this solution is its ease of install. It did not take more then a couple of hours.

The deployment can take some time because you can do a lot of configuring to meet the needs of the use cases for clients. This will take more time to configure the different areas than just the general install. We typically have two technicians on site doing the deployments.

The solution is quite expensive if we compare it with the competition. For only load balancer, it is too expensive. The license is subscription-based, except for the security model.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate F5 BIG-IP a seven out of ten.

We are a reseller of F5, but we haven't had many projects that we've deployed with F5. In terms of use cases, it is used when clients have web servers, and they are hosting on their own infrastructure. When they have web applications that are publicly visible, they use F5 to balance that incoming traffic for their web servers.

The web application firewall feature is the most valuable and useful feature. It is a leading industry product when it comes to load balancing.

Its user interface is very simple. There isn't a steep learning curve. When we initiate someone to F5, they start using it quickly.

Its price can be better. It is a bit expensive.

I have been using this solution for the last five years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. 

I never had a case that required technical support.

It is very easy to set up. It is not a complicated product. The deployment duration depends on the architecture that you're deploying, but it usually doesn't take much time.

The number of people required for its deployment depends on the size of the deployment. For a very big deployment, you need less than three people. For a fairly normal or standard deployment, just one person would be fine.

It is a bit expensive product. Kemp Loadmaster is much cheaper than F5. 

Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It can be for one year or three years.

I would recommend this solution. It is a really good solution. It is fairly straightforward, and it does what it is meant to do.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP a nine out of ten. In terms of features, it is good, but its price can be better.