F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition Reviews

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

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.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is as an LTM, which means load balancer, and also as an APM, which means Access Policy Manager, to distribute traffic to endpoints and provide security features including authentications with SAML features that provide authentication using SSL certificates.

A specific example of how I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a load balancer is by hosting it on a virtual server with multiple services, where I can place the LTM load balancer before or after a router or firewall to distribute traffic equally among servers handling the same service.

I have only one year of experience and need to grow in my understanding of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The best feature F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers is the APM providing authentication with certificates, ensuring that every user or tenant needs to be registered on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's APM to access the service.

The certificate matching process works in practice by making the environment secure as unknown users cannot access the service unless their certification keys match with the service certification.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped me complete tasks faster with fewer errors, and it makes onboarding easier for new users because its well-designed graphical user interface that freshers can easily adopt.

I believe F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved, but I do not have specific improvements to share due to my limited experience with the product. There is no need for improvements in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as it already has an adequate interface to work on.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition since last year.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable, and I have not faced any downtime because our setup is active-passive.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is highly scalable; there is no downtime regarding reliability and scalability since we can set it up as an HA pair, where if the active goes down, the passive takes over seamlessly.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very good; they quickly resolve any difficulties I face, and I appreciate their support.

Positive

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it handles traffic well and provides centralized management for certificates, efficiently managing L4 and Layer 7 load distribution and reducing CPU load on backend servers. I would rate this product 9.5 out of 10.

My main use cases for using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are mainly WAF. That's the main purpose.

We use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition mostly for the login functionality with our Salesforce and for security login purposes.

The features I appreciate the most about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are the WAF capabilities.

The advanced web application firewall protection and SSL offloading capabilities of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition have been utilized in my organization. These features are contributing to our application security and compliance posture.

I find it too complex to assess the impact of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's automated deployment and integration with container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes and OpenShift, on my applications delivery speed and reliability.

I don't use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's automated deployment and integration with container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenShift.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for about five to six years, possibly longer.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable and reliable. I have not experienced any stability or reliability issues with the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scales with us as we are continuously expanding the deals of the product.

The solution is performing well and keeping up with our needs as we continue to increase our usage.

I do not use customer service and technical support directly with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We have an integrator called Spider. They are satisfactory and whenever they encounter issues, they open a case with F5 and assist us.

I would rate the customer success and technical support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition an eight out of ten.

I have no idea about the ROI from using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We use the technology on the technical side, not on the financial aspects.

I don't have information about the pricing, setup costs, or licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I do not use the load balancing and traffic management features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I use other container orchestration platforms, but they are not relevant to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I have utilized F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's ability to integrate with cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Salesforce.

I have no idea how this integration has helped my organization manage hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

The seamless integration of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition with existing F5 technologies is not important to me as I do not use other technologies from F5.

Financially, we require F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because we need the product. We don't have anything else that performs the same functions, so we use it without trying alternatives.

I just use and manage F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, though I didn't handle its deployment.

I would recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a solution to others.

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

In my company, we use NGINX. I don't work with NGINX. For us, it is better to have the virtual solution because we have more virtual VJPs on fewer machines. This is the reason we are using it today.

It's easy to use, and they have good support. When we open tickets, they are answered quickly, and they help us solve any issues. When our environment starts to grow, it is better to have the virtual solution because we have more virtual VJPs on fewer machines.

It's expensive and could be cheaper. At the moment, I can't think of anything to improve.

It's very stable. We use a cluster in our environment. We use the cluster more when we need to update some of our machines to ensure no downtime. It is very stable.

The scalability is satisfactory based on our needs.

They have good support. When we open tickets, they are answered quickly, and they help us solve any issues.

Neutral

One day is enough to set up. Today, we deploy a machine by ourselves. When we started to implement the environment, we had support from F5. Today, for example, if it's necessary to deploy a new machine, I can do this by myself.

It's like FortiWeb. It's expensive and could be cheaper.

The solution is very good. I would rate the solution maybe ten out of ten. 

I use the solution in my company to meet the virtualization needs of our customers. In the case of a payment gateway, according to the application, every VirtualBox gets segregated. Every VirtualBox will have multiple banks connected to one particular vCMP for a specific application.

The solution's most valuable feature is its good virtualization concepts. My company is very happy with all the basic features of the product.

On-the-go upgrades are an option that the tool currently lacks, making it an area where improvements are required. If you have an instance where you have a specific configuration of CPU memory when you want to increase it, you have to parallelly create a new instance, and you have to export and import the configurations. On the go, if you could give any option to shut down VirtualBox, increase CPUs, and start it again, that would be a good option.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for more than four to five years.

It is a scalable solution.

In F5 BIG-IP i5800, if you have assigned a single CPU and memory for a virtual instance and if it increases, you can just add a CPU and memory to the existing vCMP. What you have to do is spin one more virtual instance with the two CPUs and double the memory, like eight GB memory, for example. You can't just increase the existing VirtualBox. You have to create another VirtualBox parallel, download the configurations, and import it.

My company provides one banking application to around ten customers. My company has around seven virtual instances and seven applications, each application having around 70 customers running on one F5 BIG-IP i5800. My company has created seven VirtualBox.

The solution's technical support was good. Whenever my company reached out to the product's support team, we got solutions to our issue. In case an issue doesn't get solved, then it gets escalated, and the product's support team provides our company with an engineer to deal with the problem.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model and the cloud model. For the on-premises version, my company deployed it on something like F5 BIG-IP i5800, and for the cloud deployment, we have installed the virtualizations on Cisco CSP kind of tools. My company ensures that VirtualBox is deployed on CSP. In both the aforementioned scenarios, we have tested the tool, after which we started to use the product in the past two to three years.

My company's customers need to make payments for the licensing charges attached to the product. It is an expensive product. As per the requirements of our company's customers, we opt for it if it is the only hosting option available. My company also needs to see which box from F5 matches the requirements of our customers.

Speaking about the impact of the tool on the application delivery process, I can say that static routes are limited. For every vCMP, there are some limitations of VLAN IDs and static routes, like the number of routes that can be added. There are some limitations in the product that are likely to impact our company's applications.

In terms of performance and scalability features, according to the application limit, my company can add a single CPU per vCMP or two CPUs per vCMP, which is dependent on the load requirements that we plan. The company also needs to plan according to the application requirements. My company didn't face any issues following the aforementioned process.

My company provisions vCMPs based on the concurrent session support and SSL support criteria. Based on the data sheets, my company checks the total concurrent connections, SSL connections, and throughput limit. Even when my company plans to do segregations, we plan to do them according to the specifications described in the data sheets.

You need ten pieces of the tool for load balancing. If my company's customers' requirements only consist of a product that offers five features, then they can adopt a basic OEM tool. If some customers need more features in a product, my company recommends F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Mostly our company's customers do accept our suggestions and choose F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it since it is a user-friendly and not-so-complex tool.

The integration capabilities of the product are easy to use, and there is no complexity involved in it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for web application firewalls and VPNs. It could be your VPN concentrator, intelligent DNS, and load balancing.

For public clouds like AWS in Azure, the solution can use AutoDiscovery to discover the members of the virtual machines in AWS and Azure based on their tagging mechanism. This way, when you add a new virtual machine, it will automatically be added to the Virtual Edition's post.

It has a web application firewall (WAF) module. It has to get web application security. It has DoS layer 7 protection, which not many vendors have. The solution also automatically builds the thresholds for DoS attacks so that you don't have to configure the DoS manually. You enable it with basic settings, and it's using machine learning to learn the baseline and detect DoS attacks.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a heavy system that needs a lot of CPU, memory, and hard disk. Also, the solution's center management is not very well managed.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The solution has been much more stable over the last few years because it's an old product, and its bugs were fixed.

The technical support is good for a complex product like F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The solution's initial setup is easy because most bugs are fixed.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is an expensive solution, but it's worth the price.

We have deployed the solution on VMware, private cloud, and public cloud. F5 is going to release a new product, BIG-IP Next, which will be a new implementation of BIG-IP with many more features. BIG-IP Next is going to be more cloud-friendly because it's going to be based on containers.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has a scripting module. If something is not in the default functionality, you could always make a script that will solve your issue. Even if it's something that would take a week, you'll still be able to write a script to solve your custom use case. Most vendors don't have such scripting functionality.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is worth it, but it's a complex solution that has many functions. Users may have to do some learning instead of using it straight away. The learning material is publicly available to learn, but it will take time.

The solution's integration is straightforward because it integrates well with others like Splunk. The solution's security functionality is one of the best for the on-premises device. Nowadays, the solution has integration with shared security.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use it in the IT environment in Brazil for a financial bank in Latin America. 

We're primarily using BIG-IP LTM across our data centers, employing it for global load balancing with GTM. This setup is crucial for our operations in Mexican, Colombia, and Brazil as well.

The biggest impact is in security solutions, for example, with HCM, which is recognized in the Gartner. We use BIG-IP for cloud security and branch management in the cloud.

Moreover, the integration with other networks or security solutions improves the infrastructure.

In Brazil, within the government environment, we use BIG-IP for load balancing and another solution as a proxy, which is called Blue Coat. 

We utilize BIG-IP, for example, for load balancing. The VPN model we use is called ARC. The first solution connecting with BIG-IP is very effective.

The features that I like include LTM and Global Traffic Manager (GTM).

BIG-IP could improve in supporting microservices, for example, in Docker and Kubernetes environments. 

Accessing and load balancing with Docker and Kubernetes is becoming more common in financial banks to scale services globally.

I have been using it for many years. 

The stability is 50-50 because the environment has a lot of connections, which influences stability. For example, the VM in the environment sometimes becomes unstable, particularly the connection. In such cases, we need to decrease the connections within the environment.

Scalability is easier to manage because it's possible to scale up big clusters, both in cloud-based and enterprise environments. So, it caters well to new business segments.

There are 8,000 end users in the company.

My impression of the support team is mixed; sometimes good, sometimes bad. For example, when I raised a ticket for an IMEI issue and needed to replace BIG-IP, it failed. No problem, this process is very easy for replacing the software. So, I had a complex problem in my environment. The standard package was not satisfactory.

Neutral

I used a different solution, but its performance was very bad in comparison to F5 BIG-IP.

The initial setup is 50% complex and 50% easy because I had to follow a lot of steps. It wasn't that simple. 

In our environment, it is 90% in AWS. I use BIG-IP in the cloud, where the cloud fronts are AWS, Columbia, and Brazil, creating the infrastructure.

The pricing is standard. 

The pricing is moderate,  not too expensive, and not too cheap. For a small company, it might be considered very expensive.

I would recommend using this solution. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We use it for two applications.

I've also used the Virtual Edition in the network core alongside the hardware appliances. I don't think there's any issue with either. Both seem to be working well simultaneously.

It's easy to integrate with others. I've integrated it with McAfee Solutions, Aruba NAC, and the EMS tool from Micro Focus.

It's easily manageable with various solutions.

I like the virtualization aspect, similar to what you get with cloud services or VMware.

I have a specific issue with the network interface connector, the NIC.

We're limited to a maximum of two NICs in a virtualized environment. It's a limitation of the tool.

So, Network Interface Connectors (NICs) need to be improved. More NICs would be helpful.

I have been using it for three months. I use the latest version. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

No issues with scalability. Virtual Edition handles traffic spikes.

The main difference between the Virtual Edition and the hardware is that you run the F5 image on VMware or any other cloud platform. In my experience, I haven't faced any issues with scalability or manageability due to virtualization. It's been good.

In our IT department, no one uses the Virtual Edition for F5. However, our customers use the Virtual Edition.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

We were using the hardware initially because it was too expensive for our client. That's why they wanted to go with the BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

There weren't any major issues with the deployment, but it wasn't completely seamless. 

Virtual Edition required some additional work compared to hardware, like provisioning and sizing tasks. 

However, once configured, it's easy to scale by increasing the VM size.

VM size adjustments weren't difficult, but it's not as straightforward as hardware deployment. 

The deployment time depends on the configuration. It might take one day or one hour, depending on the number of applications that need to be configured. 

My company is a system integrator.

It is a yearly-based license. I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

We had Redware and Palo Alto. 

We had limitations in Redware with the number of virtual servers and tools. F5 doesn't have those limitations. 

Plus, for security, we can configure policy profiles across layers 3, 4, 7, and even 2. F5 also has persistence and separate mechanisms for things like server acceleration.  

I would recommend using this solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The tool's investment is less than a physical device. 

The tool has limitations with respect to code and RAM. 

I have been working with the solution for four to five months. 

The solution is not as stable as a physical device. It has dependencies on the physical server as well. 

Technical support is expensive. They offer advanced service only when you purchase a full solution. 

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's deployment is complex. The deployment timeline can vary between 4 days to one week. 

I rate the product a seven out of ten.