Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

I used it as a front end to an RDS Farm. Its load-balancing port 80 and port 443 to multiple RDS Gateways. It's deployed as a virtual appliance on an on-prem virtual machine hosted on the Hyper-V server. Kemp LoadMaster is used by more than 1,000 internal users on a daily bases to access the application system at the back end. It's not exposed to the internet, it's used only from internal users inside the corporate LAN. We have daily VM backups setup as well as application backups from inside KEMP.

We used to have DNS round-robin based load balancing from some small applications but it was not highly available and if one instance were to do down half of the traffic would go down. We have tested the build it Microsoft Load balancer, but it was free and it was not reliable. Currently, we are using ZEN NLB for a few small applications that do not require many features but when it came to having a proper NLB for 1000 users the ZEN NLB could not handle the load. We have tested F5 and Kemp and Kemp were much cheaper and easier to setup.

I like that this is a Network Load Balancer that can be used practically with any application in the backend. They have how-to guides on how to set up Kemp NLB with Exchange, but you can use it as well for Sharepoint, RDS, or any other back end server. I like that the interface is intuitive, you have the option to load an SSL certificate on it so then the traffic can be inspected there, this is especially important when you have an Exchange server or RD Gateway at the back that heavily uses SSL Certificates. It has an option to be HA so if you need you can set up two of them to be up and running at the same time in Active-Active fashion. 

The product is really good as-is out of the box. If there is one thing I would change is to have the license file not be coupled with the MAC address of the device. This is actually not really useful in a virtual environment where if you have a single VM with KEMP LoadMaster and you have not set up static MAC Address, if you, for example, recreate the VM and just load the disk file on a new VM it will get new MAC address and the NLB will not work as it will not see a proper license. You need to call their support, explain what the issue is, and then they will generate a new license that you can apply. If this is a production environment and you just had an outage and quickly required the VM then you are extending the outage by the time it will take to get their support to help with the new license.

I have been using Kemp LoadMaster for more than two years.

It's rock-solid and very stable.

It can scale easily, I believe you only need to load a new license.

Technical support is nice, they will help you over the phone/email but I had few questions about the design and even professional services were not purchased their support engineer did a screen sharing session to take a look on the configuration to make sure it's following their best practices for the use case we were using it for.

I have used ZEN NLB and Microsoft NLB.

It was easy to get in touch with their sales and get it ordered.

I have implemented it myself.

KEMP NLB is on the cheaper side of the spectrum but works great. If your license expires it will still run just you won't be able to do any changes.

Yes, F5.

Its a nice and easy NLB to set up and operate on a day to day basis. I highly recommend it. 

We primarily use this solution as an application load balancer internally and externally for load balancing of web-based software.

The pricing of the solution is valuable.

The ability to see live traffic is not great and can be improved. When we check live traffic via the external link, we sometimes see up to 80 concurrent connections but find it difficult to drill down into them. So although we can see 80, we can't drill down to get more information about those 80 connections. Additionally, the graphics for the solution can be improved.

We have been using the solution for approximately three years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We are currently using the load balancer for six internal and external applications. During the last utilization, we noticed that we're barely doing 20%, so I believe we can have more applications.

Regarding people managing and using it, 6% are in telecom and are responsible for Kemp LoadMaster, but approximately a thousand users are connecting to it internally.

I rate customer service and support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten. It is easy.

I believe this solution has the best pricing in the market. It is a corporate price.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good, but its ability to investigate life traffic and its graphics can be improved. My advice for users considering this solution is to ensure they have adherent to deploy it.

We use an on-premises Skype for Business Server VoIP service that utilizes the Kemp LoadMaster LM-2400 for service resiliency. This allows our three front-end servers to seamlessly support our service. We never miss a call and our chat service is always ready as a result.

Kemp has a pre-made virtual service profile that perfectly fits our use case so the initial setup is quite easy. We also have expanded the use of the LoadMaster to accommodate a number of ancillary services that also require resilience.

The Kemp LoadMaster is easy to set up, well documented, and very easy to maintain. It has done a flawless job supporting our Microsoft Skype for Business Server VoIP services, as well as expanding to cover a number of other services that require load balancing.

The LoadMaster has helped to keep our Voice over IP services in-house, which has produced tremendous savings versus hosting our services in the cloud. This has allowed us to devote our resources to other projects, increasing our overall effectiveness.

The load balancing features of the LoadMaster are the best we have used.

Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid. Kemp maintains a library of templates pre-configured for a number of services, including Microsoft Skype for Business Server. This makes configuring the virtual services very easy. It also makes it very easy to add additional virtual services as you find new use cases. The convenience of being able to download new or updated templates from Kemp's support site cannot be understated.

If I had to pick an area for improvement, I think it would be direct integration with the template library. At present, you need to download the templates from the Kemp support portal and then upload them onto the LoadMaster. It would be much easier to have the management interface directly integrate with the Kemp Support library, allowing you to choose the desired template from the online catalog to then directly download to the LoadMaster.

We first implemented our Kemp LoadMaster eight years ago when we launched a new VoIP project that required load balancing for enhanced reliability.

The stability is rock solid. We have only experienced one issue in eight years. Kemp support was all over it and got us back online in no time.

For our organization, the LM-2400 is perfectly sized. I'm sure it has an upper limit but we have not gotten anywhere near it yet.

Kemp tech support has been absolutely fantastic. 

We have had one hardware issue, which over a span of eight years isn't bad at all, and one setup question. Both of these issues were handled quickly and to our satisfaction.

Previously, we had been using a Barracuda load balancer. It was nice but the management was not as easy to use and it was not quite as reliable as we would have liked.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The virtual service templates provided by Kemp make setup a snap!

We used a vendor team but our assigned technician was not familiar with networking or load balancing. I ended up taking over the setup and it couldn't have been easier.

The Kemp LoadMaster is a tremendous value. It works well and is easy to set up and to maintain.

Barracuda and F5 were evaluated as well. The performance and value were found to be much better with the Kemp LoadMaster.

The Kemp LoadMaster just works. It is extraordinarily difficult to suggest any changes that might improve its feature set. Go with Kemp, you won't regret it!

Our primary use is to provide application load balancing for inbound SMTP mail and webmail for Microsoft Exchange.

We have also used the product to load balance Citrix applications and delivery controllers. In our Citrix environment, it is much easier to implement, manage, and use versus Citrix's own Netscaler that we have used in the past.

It fixed our issue with internal webmail and SMTP overload. The product works exactly as advertised and we are thrilled with it. We now have webpage acceleration and can even load balance geographically with virtual boxes in our Microsoft Azure space.

Kemp basically has taken the overloading of one of our servers and now spreads it across three servers without any hiccups. We have excellent performance, see real data for our connections, and have no complaints from our end users. That is a very big help for us!

The user interface is very easy to work with. We did not have to hire outside services to implement what we figured out ourselves and saved plenty of money.

Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for 10 years.

We have had zero stability problems, ever!

It works well.  You can make them an HA pair or put in larger units if required with an easy upgrade path moving the configuration from one bx to another.

We made one phone call and the problem was resolved, immediately. We had a resolution in 12 minutes!

My understanding is the company is built from engineers who left a competitor and took what people complained about at the original company and made it into a better product. Their support always picks up within minutes. In this day and age, sitting around waiting for techs to pick up the phone is a draining task! I do not like companies that have poorly trained engineers who don't pick up the phone!

Their support team is based in the US and that helps us as well. They seem to understand that we only call if there is a problem we cannot solve. Their engineers are really well trained and understand the root of the problem immediately, almost every time. Again, it's hard to complain about this product as we love it!

We tried a few products and they were expensive and overly complicated.

The initial setup was very easy. The configuration took about 20 minutes through a web browser.

We implemented and deployed in-house.

For about $2,500, we have already made our money back!

At $2,500 USD, this is absolutely a fantastic buy for the money!

We went with Kemp after trying other products like the Netscaler, the F5 solutions, and a few other lesser-known vendors. The Kemp solution gave us everything in the box without having to pay for any additional licenses.

Overall, the product has covered what we needed and even offered some additional features.

It's really hard to say what can be improved when we do not have any complaints, to begin with. I just have to say that even Microsoft named Kemp their preferred load balancer for Microsoft Exchange in the past.

The primary use case of this solution was to replace our Citrix Netscaler and help us load balance traffic for solutions such as Citrix, Exchange, RDP, as well as for web servers using HTTP and SMTP.

We have been able to manage several applications as well as run certain services such as Exchange through the WAF. This is with it all being on one screen instead of jumping to several different windows to see how everything is configured. It helps out.

The pre-configured templates help our technicians correctly modify the services, which is another benefit.

We are most impressed with the ease of use and great support.

The features we have found most valuable would be the Kemp 360, which helps narrow down the logging.

You can filter and review which IPs are causing issues.

I also like how there are templates for various types of technologies, such as RDP, Exchange, etc. It helps tremendously when making sure that everything is configured.

I definitely think that the WAF can be improved. We have had several issues for which, at times some our services that were being run through the kemp would stop working. It was strange because everything showed green. Their first solution was to enable/disable the WAF and it worked. But then at time it stopped again and it required further investigation with Kemp support in which logs were needed to be turned on and collected to analyze the behavior. 

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for two months.

Stability-wise, so far so good. Sometimes we wish we had a little more notice if something wasn’t working, such as a notification email.

AMAZING! Their support team is US-based and quick to answer, help troubleshoot, solve problems.

We used Citrix Netscaler prior to this product.

The initial setup was straightforward and the support team was also very helpful.

In-house with minimal experience.

Setup is easy, the cost is affordable, and the licensing is quick and simple.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution. 

We have several customers for different services. We have built services on private cloud libraries. We load Java and Python. A lot of these applications interact at multiple data points. For that, we use software load balancers. 

It has been functional. We don't have any outages. 

When we go serverless, we may again have to revisit this because the configuration needs to be changed. With this change, we can run into a lot of other configurations that we haven't got into, which involve additional expenses. It would be challenging to convince management to buy at that price point. It would be a balancing act of justifying that expense and the value, that is, how it is going to save a bit of time and make our platform secure.

It can have better configuration ability. A lot of iterations happen when we have multiple servers pointing to the same domain. If we do not orchestrate carefully, it gets into a loop, which takes away the precious time of the user who is trying to subscribe to a service. It takes a little longer time to realize services as well as web pages.

I have been using this solution for the past four months.

It is stable. We don't have any outages.

It is scalable. It is a load balancer. We have around 2 lakh customers who are using our systems. Every single login has to go through these load balancers.

In terms of our plans to increase its usage, we are thinking of implementing our solution across the cloud. Therefore, when we go serverless, we may need a lot of cloud balancers. We will have to move to a virtual cloud balancer, which is altogether a multi-cloud. We want to take it across multiple geographic locations, which would be huge work.

They are excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

The initial setup was easy. We took it into production after two days, and it took less than 30 minutes.

We implemented it ourselves, but consultants gave us all the information and required knowledge about how to verify. We spent two days doing a hands-on exercise in our staging area, and we were able to understand the entire software ergonomics. After we understood and played around, we finally did some hackathon. We finally concluded that the build is safe and secure, so we posted it. After that, we decided to post it to production. It took less than 30 minutes. We have three DevOps. Our overall software development team has around 20 people.

Currently, no cost is involved with a virtual load balancer. They have used open source. We did not pay for software. We paid for the expertise. We are only paying the consulting charges, which are very reasonable, that is, around a thousand dollars.

The load balancer that we're using right now is for having a tougher load balance between all the services. Very soon, we are looking forward to rolling out a serverless platform on Azure so that we remove the dependency on DevOps configurations and having this container management hub. We will move to a virtual load balancer. They have offered us a pretty competitive price. We are not using all the capabilities. We are only using a subset. We are in touch with their team, and they are very collaborative.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. If they're looking out for a load balancer for a cloud or on-premises deployment, Kemp LoadMaster definitely works.

I would rate Kemp LoadMaster a nine out of ten. It is hard to find a thing to complain about.

Our organization provides resources for public safety. For continuous service and support, we need to run our system with high availability and avoid failures or downtime. 

Kemp LoadMaster helps us achieve this goal by utilizing the Kemp LoadMaster virtual appliance in our VMware environment. Kemp LoadMaster allows us to provide load balancing and high availability to our web and API services for internal and public use, making sure that public safety is not put at risk.

Along with making sure public safety is not put at risk, Kemp LoadMaster allows us to keep our web services secure by adding another security layer with its web application firewall and IPS.

Kemp LoadMaster has greatly improved our uptime while reducing the time spent on maintenance of the virtual appliances, allowing the IT team to concentrate on other projects.

Because of the reduced time from the Kemp maintenance, we able to spend more time making sure that the hardware and server software is up to date. Kemp allows us to now have the flexibility of updating and applying firmware or software upgrades that would normally be service impacting to our infrastructure to be done during work hours without any interruptions.

The most valuable feature is the load balancing and allowing for high availability of our web services. If we need a maintenance window to apply updates to any of our infrastructure that would normally be service-impacting or require extensive steps to prevent it from being service-impacting, is now simplified to "it just works".

Also, what makes it very valuable is the fact that Kemp listens to its customer base. You have the ability to request new features and it does not fall on deaf ears. The development team is very responsive and accommodating to their customers.

The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles. The knowledge base that is there is well done, but it would be excellent to see it expanded out. For those fringe installations, technical support is more than willing to assist.

The one thing that I would love to see implemented is the ability for Kemp to automate certificate creation through Let's Encrypt. That way I can cut back on my cost of certificates and also pushes towards a more centralized location for certificate management. 

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for just over one year.

This product is extremely stable. We have the metered license so the Kemp appliance has to phone home monthly to send our statistics for the month and the only issue we have ran into is the phone home feature failed once which could have been caused by an internet hiccup.

It is easy to scale the solution. If needed another load balancer, it's as simple as firing up another LoadMaster VM.

Customer service is fast and responsive. Haven't had to use it very often, if at all. 

We were using Simple Failover, but it was running into issues and we were looking for more of an enterprise solution.

Setup is cake. It is straightforward and easy.

Kemp's team helped with the implementation while I drove the keyboard. Kemp's knowledge and expertise were top notch.

ROI was immediate and gives the peace of mind knowing if something happens to one of my servers, nothing will be seen by the public.

The price is great and the value is definitely there.

We also evaluated F5.

We acquired Kemp LoadMaster initially to balance our Exchange multi-site environment. We configured it and now balance the Autodiscover, OWA, and mail services for our three Exchange services in three different sites. Everything flows and works without issues.

As time went on, we added other services such as RDP connections, online banking, and other applications to the LM to balance the load, which made our operations even more efficient.

The implementation of the LoadMaster has created internal and operational efficiencies. It allows us to balance several applications all at once with an easy-to-setup and use application.

The security features, load balancing, built-in templates, and the easy to implement virtual IPs are great. It allows us to accomplish our goals with one application.

In the next release, Kemp should include the ability for LoadMaster to create different DNS record types.

We have been using Kemp LoadMaster for about three years.

The product is very stable. I have had no issues. 

Every experience I have had with the technical support team has been great. I've worked with about four different engineers and they have all given consistent good service. 

This was the first solution of this type.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as there are many built-in templates. Even though I had the assistance of the support team to ensure everything was good, it was a breeze.

The deployment was done by our in-house team.

This is a cost-efficient product.

I didn't really evaluate other options. In my research, I saw great recommendations for the product to balance exchange, so I tested it and it worked well.

It's a great product to use if you need to balance multiple sites and applications. It is easy to set up, the support engineers are top-notch, and it is cost-efficient as well.