F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition Reviews

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to facilitate site-to-user communication and to enable access to site services. In my environment, we have an internal DMZ zone, which includes an HTTP server and Telnet services. When an external remote user wants to connect with our services, we need to use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for the round-robin method to ensure that the services have 24/7 reachability without any interruption.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers for me include many aspects of the load balancer, with iRules being one of the best features. Additionally, for SSL, we can utilize it for SSL clients or SSL users, and we can perform specific bridging, which is also a good feature.

iRules have helped me by providing a full proxy system for SSL. If we configure client-side SSL and server-side SSL, there will be separate communications, but it will function as a full proxy, which is a beneficial aspect for us.

I can smartly manage F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to build everything according to our requirements, as there is nothing set by default, but we can add things. We can perform many tasks with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, including reachability and client separation, server health monitoring, and utilizing pre-templates that apply on behalf of iRules. We can modify or change our configurations as needed, and the load balancer method can be applied dynamically and statically. There are multiple functions we can utilize with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which is very advantageous for us.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization mainly through our services' reachability for 24/7 operation without interruption, as well as load balancing, allowing us to manage our traffic for multiple servers using the same load balancer.

I hope future updates could include advanced routing and firewall concepts in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, especially since SD-WAN technology exists; integrating it could significantly enhance the services. I believe integrating SD-WAN technology would be a beneficial improvement.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for one year.

I have noticed improvements in performance, uptime, and management since using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The round-robin method and health monitoring are beneficial, as performance is very good with the load being equally distributed to all servers. This results in fast movement, providing a service with quick access and no delays. It effectively monitors server health, ensuring if any servers go down, it promptly addresses that issue.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is reliable.

It can handle growth easily.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been satisfactory. While getting a trial license, I communicated with the customer support team, and they responded in a timely manner. However, there was a wait time of two or three days, which could be improved.

Previously, I used an old proxy server method, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has taken over for the proxy.

As of now, I have not seen a return on investment during my trial period.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I would advise others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that it is the best instrument for load balancing. If you desire scalability for your network and enhanced speed for accessing servers, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides a great user experience, yielding positive responses and access systems for services that will keep your customers satisfied. My experience indicates that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is doing a great job. I give this product a rating of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that we are in the process of publishing services, observing the traffic of the published services publicly, and any backend servers. We assign the virtual IPs and then check the traffic and bypass the traffic which is blocked according to the requirements of the customer.

A specific example of how I have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a recent troubleshooting scenario where we had to whitelist one of the API calls that was passing through the WAF of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We went onto the physical servers, checked the log traffic, added the text file, and whitelisted the text file and applied the configuration. This is how the traffic was exempted from passing through the WAF.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers extensive documentation available for any help required and the capability for multiple licenses within a single platform.

The documentation has helped me significantly by allowing me to avoid having to install new hardware or separate appliances for WAF, BIG-IP, load balancers, and different ADCs, as I can manage everything in one big box and purchase the licenses. The ease of use of the documentation makes it straightforward for many users here, so it is easy to find use cases on the internet.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by providing separate candidates for managing F5 traffic, leading to more effective publishing of services publicly, assigning public IP addresses, and then assigning the virtual IPs, nodes, pools, pool members, and all of that. It definitely provides a granular approach to the device.

I truly appreciate the power of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition compared to any other vendor we have used, and we have seen more use cases coming in, proving it to be better than other products.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved by enhancing the GUI, as I think it should be more user-friendly.

Aside from the GUI improvements, I find that with other products, everything appears more organized. For instance, with FortiWeb, we have a dashboard where I can check the policy status with just one click, and everything is easily accessible. In F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, it tends to require navigating through menus and sub-menus.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in different roles, specifically in banking, where I used BIG-IP LTM in one infrastructure. Currently, I am working in an environment where we are using the ASM module as a WAF.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable.

When my organization needs to handle more traffic or add more applications, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scales up easily without running into any issues, and it is very smooth.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides very good customer support. I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a perfect ten based on all of the experience I have had so far.

Positive

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using a different solution, specifically FortiADC for Application Delivery Controller and FortiWeb for ASM.

It was relatively easy to deploy F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition initially due to my team receiving support from F5. We were there for them, and it was pretty much taken care of by the F5 support team.

I would describe the learning curve for my team adopting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as definitely present. We learned a lot from it, especially from the provided documentation and many use cases available over the internet.

Integration with other solutions or platforms in my environment through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has not posed any challenges. It is pretty straightforward with the appliances that we currently have.

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as compared to other appliances we have used. With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have not faced any RMAs, which has made a positive operational impact.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition would emphasize its scalability, the power of the appliance, and its reliability, which are big pluses for the product.

I have a positive response on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. However, I strongly feel that the GUI needs to be a bit more user-friendly, as I find FortiWeb's GUI more accessible, even though the product is not as powerful as F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. My overall rating for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is eight out of ten.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is for LTM and GTM. For LTM, I use it for load balancing, and GTM is for global load balancing, which functions as intelligent DNS.

Let's suppose we have one application abc.com. We create an alias on abc.gslb.com and forward that traffic to a CNAME, which in turn forwards the traffic to the GTM. The GTM does the load balancing between the data centers. Sometimes it is active-active, and sometimes it is an active-standby setup similar to DCDR, depending on the requirement and application team requests. After that, if there is a disaster at some data center, such as power issues, the standby data center will serve that purpose. This really increases our availability and performance of the application, and we are receiving fewer complaints, almost none.

My use case is known mainly for the GTM and LTM.

The best feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is SSL offloading. There are different methods to deploy an application at Layer 2 and Layer 3 setup. Based on the requirement, we do that, so it is a complete ADC application delivery control, providing all the solutions that the application team needs.

A particular feature I need in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is iRule redirection. If they need SSL offloading or pass-through, or bridging, all kinds of solutions are available. Based on the requirement, we can fulfill those needs, even with GTM topology, which can be active-active or active-standby. In load balancing, there are different methods, so ratios and all can be easily configured as per the requirement. It works as a full proxy architecture, so it has the full capability to understand the request and response.

Another feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that stands out to me is that it is template-based. For rapid deployment, if we need to create hundreds or thousands of VIPs at the same time, we can use iApp and scripting to do that easily. These are the major features, and for automation, we can easily manage that through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization. Without LTM, there is a single point of failure. Since we have LTM, we are protecting our application. Previously we faced DoS attacks, and through iRule, we blocked those IPs. This iRule is a great feature, and now with our LTM, we are not exposing our actual server on the internet. Instead, we are exposing our VIP IP, providing security and scalability. We have the flexibility to add or remove servers as needed.

Regarding specific metrics or outcomes, earlier if one of the servers went down, there was a significant impact. Since F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a smart device, it can monitor the services and applications irrespective of the port, checking whether the application is available or not. It is significantly reducing downtime. If any server is causing an issue, such as if the service is running but the internal application has crashed, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition will mark that server as down and will not send traffic to it. This increases performance and availability, building trust with clients, which directly translates into revenue. If there is reputational loss, we can lose money as well for the organization. We send our solutions to other vendors and recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a great product that everyone should need.

Improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition should include training for newcomers. If they are not aware, it can be beneficial for them to learn. In authentication, there is currently a single method to add a single IP. Adding a fallback IP would also help. I am not sure if that feature will be included in the upcoming version, but I am still using an older version where that feature is not available.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for approximately five years, and I have been working on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition LTM virtual editions.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to definitely go with the full potential of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition LTM. It is a great product that will make your life easier and reduce costs. They provide great support, and the TAC team is there whenever needed. You can log a case and they will help.

Negative

Our main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is for virtual VIP configuration and SSL offload. We use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for SSL offload by utilizing a particular VIP with a specific SSL certificate saved and served by F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for that particular VIP.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers seamless connectivity and a user-friendly interface, which is very good compared to other load balancers where multiple issues arise, and troubleshooting is very useful for big applications such as payments.

My team is using the features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for troubleshooting. For example, during our ACI leaf switch reboot, we faced connectivity issues where backend servers connected to ACI were stuck with stale entries, but clearing these entries immediately brought the VIP back up.

Since using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, the main improvements I have noticed are with multiple VIPs that work together. Whenever something breaks, we can monitor traffic and logs more effectively than with other load balancers.

The visibility and monitoring features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition have helped reduce downtime and made troubleshooting faster for my team. In the last four years, out of around 50 incidents, only a small portion was related to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, while most issues derived from other sources.

Improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could include a more straightforward process for major updates where we could pre-schedule upgrades to avoid downtime.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for the last six years.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very scalable, allowing us to easily expand or modify applications.

Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very good. I rate customer support a 10 out of 10, as they are knowledgeable and provide straightforward troubleshooting.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we used multiple environments, starting with Citrix NetScaler, then moving to Avi Load Balancer and Radware, primarily based on management decisions. Radware was evaluated, but its frequent failures were unacceptable.

Regarding pricing, I believe it is high, but the setup cost is low and licensing is fine, though I do not have the complete analysis from our sales team. I understand that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is expensive but provides the best features.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition did not impact anything positively, as during core network activities, backend servers stopped responding due to being legacy servers, which may create issues.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has saved us time and made our work easier. Sharing information between our app team and us saves considerable time.

If someone asks for advice on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I would recommend it because it gives application teams access for monitoring and quick resolution.

For virtual environments, I believe purchasing hardware is not necessary. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a cost-effective solution that allows for growth, and its capabilities are very useful. I give this product an overall rating of 9 out of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to manage a lot of implementations across many sites. I have implemented it as LTM for local traffic management or application delivery control. I have multiple services on multiple servers and need to load balance between these servers.

After that, I have also implemented it as ASM, another module, application security manager, which acts as a WAF solution for these services.

The modules LTM and ASM help my organization day-to-day by increasing performance and balancing loads across multiple servers to help our customers. I need a very good load balancer because I have multiple services and servers providing a single service. Additionally, ASM secures these services as a WAF solution.

I have published my services to the internet to allow customers to browse our services and websites, so I need a very good WAF solution that is always updated and capable of stopping complex attacks. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides these solutions, particularly with ASM and Advanced WAF, which have a lot of features and licenses. I first deployed F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a virtual edition alongside LTM and ASM.

In my experience, the best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers include stability and credential stuffing protection, along with a full proxy for layer seven, allowing it to load balance till layer seven and on any port. This versatility is very good compared to FortiWeb, which only supports HTTP and HTTPS, making F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition a superior product for load balancing and WAF solutions.

My experience with the credential stuffing protection feature has been positive. It provides updates about username and password exposure on the darknet and deep web, alerting me when credentials are found outside my organization, which is a crucial function. I feel I can rely on F5, a big vendor, for security. Additionally, the load balancer's ability to load balance till layer seven on all ports is impressive.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition positively impacts my organization by increasing performance, allowing users to access my servers, and facilitating my publishing to those servers. I enjoy secure and high-performance web services for my customers, which is my main use case to protect my websites while allowing users to access them securely. Since implementing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I have noticed fewer security incidents, improved uptime, and measurable changes in speed and customer satisfaction.

I believe that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, whether virtual or hardware, needs improvement in the logging module. There are many issues, and accessing the CLI to remove older logs to see new ones is cumbersome. I have mentioned this multiple times and opened support tickets, hoping it can be resolved in future versions.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for one year.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's scalability is good but needs improvement.

The customer support from F5 is very professional. I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I used FortiWeb, but I switched to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because FortiWeb only supported load balancing for HTTP and HTTPS.

The initial setup and configuration of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are very good. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has a great GUI and concept; everyone in the IT field first learns about load balancing through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Most of my team holds certifications for F5 implementations.

I handle updates and patch management for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition by reaching out to support, downloading the ISO file, then uploading it to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and upgrading it using this ISO. It is a simple process.

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as it secures my organization with WAF solutions against web attacks while enabling me to publish and load balance multiple servers with a single VIP.

The setup cost for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is reasonable, as my team is certified and skilled in implementations. However, the software or product itself is on the higher cost side, but I see a good return on investment for this product.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I evaluated other options, specifically FortiWeb.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has integrated with my existing security tools by sending logs and flows from F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to IBM QRadar as syslog and NetFlow.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition handles high availability and failover in my environment with two units in active standby. I create a device group where one unit is active and the other is secondary. After configuring the active unit, I push the configurations to the secondary unit, so when maintenance is needed or if the active VM goes down, the passive unit quickly becomes active, handling all traffic for my customers.

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to implement it in a well-structured manner; having a detailed design before implementation will be very useful. For example, creating internal and external VLANs can help in future expansions. I would rate this product a ten on a scale of one to ten.

I have multiple use cases for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. One use case involves using it purely as a load balancer. I have multiple back-end pools that need to be exposed to the internet with the help of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Another use case involves F5 VPN, which uses Access Policy Manager on the BIG-IP side so customers can dial into their VPN profile to access the intranet where the company operates.

Within APM, we have different use cases. Some users want to connect with Active Directory credentials, some want to connect with single sign-on authentication, and some want to connect with multi-factor authentication. For authentication, users have to provide their RADIUS token as well as their Active Directory passwords. Beyond normal VPN users, we have use cases to use APM as a portal access, which means instead of network access, we customize whatever application needs to be accessed by the end users. We can customize that application through the browser and users can access it as a portal. Additionally, I use F5 ASM, which is the advanced WAF, to mitigate vulnerabilities based on the applications we are using.

My favorite features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are SSL offloading and iRule. SSL offloading can also be seen in other competitors such as Radware and Citrix. However, iRule is something that allows us to control the traffic very granularly. We are able to customize how we want to control the traffic. I see a big advantage in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's iRules.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides granular control. F5 also provides a free license for one month. Even for an intern or an engineer who does not have lab resources in their environment, they can use this one-month free trial license. They can set up a lab and learn extensively. This helps us to upskill ourselves. Moreover, all solution documents are easily available on the F5 official site. It is very hard to find this information in other products such as Cloudflare or Radware. They provide only the outline of what we are looking for, but they do not give detailed information on what it does and how it does. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides this information for free.

A downside of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that to capture TCP dump, in Palo Alto, we can do it within the UI itself. However, here, to capture the TCP dump, we need to log in into the CLI and be familiar with the commands. Sometimes the commands that we keep handy work, and sometimes they do not work. We have to look for the command again and prepare with the correct commands. Another issue is logs. Logs can sometimes be pretty hard to analyze to determine what causes the issue. For example, in some use cases, if we try to find out if the pool member is flapping, I would say the active pool member is also showing that it flaps for every second for some milliseconds. That is a significant downside.

I have been working with the solution for almost 10 years.

I have used Radware as an alternative. I used Radware WAF as well as Radware load balancer. Comparatively, I find F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition more effective in both the WAF as well as the LTMs.

If I were to choose one solution, I would really go for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I would rate this solution an 8.5 out of 10.

I am currently using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for LTM and GTM purposes across two data centers. For load balancing between the data centers, I use GTM, and within a data center, load balancing is handled by LTM.

For a critical application, we have created an active standby setup using GTM. If something happens with DC1, traffic will automatically be transferred to DC2. For the LTM use case, we have an application such as abc.com with 50 servers behind it, and we perform load balancing between those servers.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers exceptional features, primarily SSL Offloading and redirection, which I use on most of the VIPs.

SSL Offloading helps when I need to perform content inspection, and redirection allows me to redirect traffic since we do not accept traffic on port 80 and want to direct it to port 443. In scenarios where we need to redirect to a maintenance page, redirection is invaluable. When the team requires client IPs in a layer two setup, I create an iRule, which serves as another use case for logging purposes. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition does not provide client IP by default, so I enable logging through iRule to address this need, making these truly awesome features.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by ensuring application availability and reliability while avoiding a single point of failure through LTM and GTM. If anything goes wrong, traffic is simply redirected to a different data center. When one server goes down, LTM does not send traffic to that server, and it also helps me increase server capacity. If I need to patch and do not want to send traffic to a particular server, I can simply remove it from the pool.

Using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, specifically the LTM, has significantly reduced downtime. Previously, if any server went down, there was an outage, but now with load balancing, I can check the application status irrespective of services through health monitoring. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable with no issues regarding reliability or downtime.

To improve F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, specifically LTM, I believe that when creating an LDAP server, there is only one option to add an LDAP. If there were a secondary option to add two LDAP server IPs, that would be extremely helpful.

The primary needed improvement for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is the addition of the LDAP option.

I have already evaluated F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's scalability by defining the CPU and size accordingly.

I have worked on other solutions before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during my time in a service-based company.

I have seen a return on investment from using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as it is saving our time and money. In business terms, we are not losing business, and customers are relying on and trusting our services, which is why they are paying us. We are saving money by providing availability at all times.

I do not have visibility into the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as this part is handled by management. However, I have worked on support costs, and I believe that the support costs are reasonable compared to other vendors.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we evaluated other options such as Radware. However, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is more cost-effective and better in every aspect, plus it is user-friendly.

I would definitely recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to others so they can opt for this option.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it provides load balancers, and we have multiple pieces in our organization.

In my daily work, we generally have multiple customers, and I have set up partitions for customers, manage their URLs, and keep their servers under their VIP.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers are the partitions, and the user interface is excellent, allowing anyone to perform configurations easily using the GUI. The upgrade process is also easy, and the HA availability is very good. Whenever we face issues or something happens, we can quickly fail over with just a click. The certificate renewal process is also very easy, and iRules are powerful when using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We no longer need physical boxes after incorporating virtual IPs, which allows for easy maintenance and easy usage on F5s.

The partition setup of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is exactly like dividing customer-specific partitions and management-specific partitions. Whenever I make any changes, it affects that particular partition only, and the traffic also affects that specific partition without impacting other customers, which is the biggest strength of these virtual IPs.

The user interface of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is straightforward and clear, helping new people who are unfamiliar with it, and they can work on it easily, which is the standard performance of F5s.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization because we no longer need to maintain physical F5s, so maintenance is now very limited. Because of the user interface, anyone I want to work on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition can easily start working on it without much knowledge. After logging into F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, they can easily perform whatever tasks they want without proper help. F5 support is also very good. Whenever we encounter any issues, F5 engineers help us significantly. These are all the positive aspects.

I have saved time, reduced costs, and improved uptime since adopting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as it is very easy to work on, saving a lot of time searching and researching. We do not need as much time to gain knowledge on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is a plug-and-play solution, allowing even newcomers to perform the tasks. If we save time, it will obviously reduce costs.

One suggestion I have for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that whenever we sync with active and primary nodes, it would be better to back up the configuration or changes we have made. If it shows whatever changes I have made before syncing up, I can review them, and if any mistakes are found, I can rectify them.

I have been working on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for four years.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable, which is why I have given it a rating of nine out of ten.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's scalability is good, as it can handle traffic and multiple customers on a single F5 very quickly without any lags or issues.

The customer support experience for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is actually very poor. Whenever we need their support, it takes a considerable amount of time to get an engineer on the call. For P1 issues, we need to resolve them within twenty to forty minutes as per SLA, but it often takes more than twenty minutes to get an F5 engineer on call, and explaining the issues takes a lot of time, which is frustrating. On weekends, it is even worse.

Positive

I used to work on Citrix NetScaler in my old company, which was preferred. I did not manually switch to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, but in this organization, they are using F5s, so I needed to work on this one automatically.

I am not sure if my organization evaluated other options before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I do not have much else to add about my main use case, but I can answer your questions going forward.

I do not have much more to add about the needed improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I advise others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to take my feedback to improve customer service. I have given this product a rating of nine out of ten.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is application delivery and security, primarily for load balancing and Layer 7 (application-layer) protection of web applications.

We use it to distribute traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure high availability, performance optimization, and zero single point of failure. On the security side, we use it to protect applications from common web threats such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), CSRF, brute-force and credential-stuffing attacks, bot traffic, malicious scanners, and Layer 7 DDoS floods.

Additionally, we leverage BIG-IP VE for:

• SSL/TLS offloading and inspection to reduce server load

• Persistence/session management (cookie / source IP) for stable user sessions

• Health monitoring to automatically detect failures and route traffic to healthy nodes

• Traffic visibility and logging for troubleshooting, compliance, and faster incident response

Overall, it has been a reliable solution for improving application uptime, security posture, and user experience in production environments.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has had a very positive impact on our organization by improving application delivery, availability, and overall service stability. It has helped us ensure high uptime by distributing traffic across multiple servers and automatically routing users to healthy backend resources through effective health monitoring.

It also enhanced application performance through optimized load balancing and SSL offloading, which reduced server load and improved response times for end users. From an operational perspective, it has saved significant time for our team by providing better traffic visibility, faster troubleshooting, and centralized control, which reduced downtime and improved incident response.

Overall, BIG-IP VE has strengthened our application environment by delivering reliable performance, better availability, and faster service delivery with improved efficiency.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition’s best features are load balancing, high availability, and Layer 7 security. It keeps applications running smoothly by distributing traffic, provides failover to avoid downtime, and protects web apps from attacks like SQL injection, XSS, bots, and brute-force attempts. On top of that, the monitoring and visibility are very helpful. It makes troubleshooting faster and saves a lot of time for the operations team. Overall, it’s a reliable solution that improves performance, security, and availability at the same time.

I believe F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved in terms of pricing and licensing transparency.

However, customers who purchase through authorized partners may receive better pricing and licensing options, as it largely depends on the partner’s capability and commercial offering.

From a pricing perspective, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is somewhat high compared to others, and the licensing is provided as annual-based licenses rather than perpetual licenses.

There are some issue we are faced we are getting clear kb article 

I have been working in my current field for the last 3.5 years.

Yes, it is very stable solution you can as so far on your own requirement

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is highly scalable. You can scale it by increasing CPU/RAM resources, adding more backend pool members, and deploying additional VE instances in HA or clustered designs. It works well for growing traffic demands as long as proper sizing and licensing are planned.

yes we are supporting customer in deployment and providing technical services to all our customers

Positive

Before using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using Citrix NetScaler.

it's less complex from others

Yes, we used a local reseller and system integrator for the deployment, and the overall experience was very good. They supported us with licensing, sizing recommendations, and end-to-end implementation, and ensured a smooth rollout with proper configuration and post-deployment support.

Yes, we have seen a positive ROI with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It improved application uptime and availability through load balancing and health monitoring, which reduced service outages. It also saved operational time by enabling faster troubleshooting and centralized traffic control, and reduced backend server load through SSL offloading, resulting in better performance with fewer escalations and less downtime.

Pricing and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are generally on the higher side compared to other ADC solutions. Setup cost mainly depends on the required modules and sizing. Licensing is mostly subscription-based (annual/term), and if the evaluation license expires, some LTM features can be disabled, so license monitoring is important.

We evaluated Citrix ADC (NetScaler) before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Both are strong ADC solutions for load balancing and application delivery, but we found some key differences.

F5 BIG-IP VE vs Citrix ADC (NetScaler) – Pros & Cons

✅ F5 BIG-IP VE – Pros

• Very strong LTM load balancing and traffic management

• Mature Layer 7 security and policy control (especially with iRules and security profiles)

• Excellent stability and performance in enterprise environments

• Strong monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting visibility

• Better flexibility for advanced customization and complex use cases

❌ F5 BIG-IP VE – Cons

• Licensing and pricing can be higher compared to alternatives

• Requires skilled resources for advanced configurations (iRules, policies, security tuning)

✅ Citrix ADC – Pros

• Good load balancing and application optimization

• Often seen as cost-effective depending on licensing and bundles

• Works well in environments heavily based on Citrix virtualization / VDI

• Strong GUI-based configuration for standard use cases

❌ Citrix ADC – Cons

• Advanced customization and troubleshooting can be less flexible compared to F5

• Some enterprises find F5 more stable for high-complexity deployments

• Security/policy tuning may require more effort depending on the environment

Summary

Overall, we selected F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because it provided better application availability, stronger traffic control, and more reliable performance for our production requirements.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition 9/10 overall.

Advice: Plan the sizing and licensing properly, deploy it in HA (Active/Standby) for high availability, and monitor license validity (especially EV licenses) to avoid any service impact. If configured correctly, it delivers excellent load balancing, application availability, and Layer 7 security.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is for load balancer creation, VIP creation, iRules, and all of our on-premises related networking management.

A specific example of how I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for load balancer creation and iRules is when I write a simple iRule, and a script detects if the server is in the pool or down. If they are down, it automatically redirects the user to a friendly 'we'll be back soon' hosted page. If the pool doesn't have the target endpoints added, then traffic could fail. I need to ensure that iRules are pointing to the right pool for the hosted zones.

I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to handle SSL/TLS decryption instead of having web servers struggle to encrypt and decrypt traffic. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition does all the heavy lifting at the front door, which keeps my backend server fast and dedicated strictly to running the application code. I also use it to manage the application health check, and every few seconds, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition pings my on-premises servers to ensure they are healthy. If the servers are frozen or crash, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition automatically pulls them out of the rotation, so the user never hits a dead link.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively because we use it for all our on-premises network related setups, such as load balancing for all our application traffic. All the traffic flows through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, making it one of our primary network load balancing tools.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers include Local Traffic Manager, which goes beyond simple load balancing by using full proxy architecture, meaning it manages the connection to the user and the connection to the server separately for total control.

Another valuable feature is WAF; currently we do not use WAF from F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, but we were using it before when we were on-premises. Now we use AWS for WAF. Access Policy Manager, APM, is a best feature if you handle remote workers as it provides context-aware access, ensuring only the right people get into the right application based on device health. iRules are also an excellent feature, which I mentioned earlier.

When it comes to SSL/TLS, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent at handling high volume encryption and decryption by offloading SSL tasks to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, meaning your backend web server uses less CPU and can focus purely on the application.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition can be improved in the user interface, which looks very outdated from the version that we use. I am not certain if the newer version has a better UI.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for six years.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

I have not had any experience with customer support, and I cannot provide feedback on their support team.

Negative

I advise those looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that if you are new to networking or just a consumer of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and on-premises infrastructure, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is definitely a product that you can rely on. However, it definitely needs some additional assistance from network expertise to set up the infrastructure. You have to work closely with the network team, and the initial understanding takes time. Once you get the hang of it, you will get much more clarity on how to use it for your applications.

I am not sure if I have seen a return on investment, as this is mostly managed by a network team.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I did not evaluate other options specifically. Now that we use our cloud solution and cloud-based tools, we have AWS, Route 53, and Certificate Manager for cloud-related traffic.

I do not have any additional thoughts about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I would definitely recommend it to others, especially for on-premises related use.