Kemp LoadMaster Reviews

I have worked with Kemp products for at least 10 years, as a consultant. In most cases, they are used for load balancing Exchange environments, but also as reverse proxies for other workloads such as Skype for Business, ADFS, etc.

The customer environments vary greatly. In most scenarios, it’s up to 2,000 users but in some cases more than 30,000. My last case involving Kemp was an Exchange 2016 site-resilient solution with 12 servers for 35,000 mailboxes.

Kemp Loadmaster gives our customers an easy and cheap way of load-balancing their workloads and adding reverse proxy for added security. With Kemp 360 Central, they get a nice overview of their Kemp products and an easy way to upgrade firmware on all devices from a single interface.

Kemp products are extremely stable and meet most of my customers' needs for an ADC solution. My customers appreciate the attractive pricing, stability. and user-friendly interface. The more advanced features such as WAF are rarely required by our customers.

Their virtual products are easy to install and easy to configure.

There are plenty of features that are lacking in my opinion:

• The auth website of ESP is really lacking. It’s not responsive (mobile friendly) and the procedure of changing the website is difficult. We tend to avoid using pre-auth for that reason, and it's really a shame.
• Several elements of the GUI need work. For example, if you have many content switches, it’s difficult to find the ones you need. And where is the search feature?
• If you want logging for SMTP traffic, you have to enable ESP, which requires you to define allowed IP addresses. That’s irritating, to say the least.
• Using the GUI to view log files is tedious. A nice log parser would help.
• It lacks an officially supported, well-written SCOM Management Pack.

Kemp support is great. You always get qualified assistance and the support engineers are friendly and helpful. You can find loads of information on the support website, including deployment guides for almost any workload.

I rate it at eight out of 10. There are many features that are missing or poorly implemented and things that you simply cannot do. The product is very much “as is”, and people need to be aware of that. If you don’t want these limitations, there are other products on the market, but they are typically a bit more expensive. Kemp products are very good load-balancers but are lacking in features compared to its competitors.

We are using Kemp Virtual LoadMaster for Microsoft Exchange load balancing, Skype for Business reverse proxy, and Oracle Forms load balancing.

For Skype for Business, we were using Microsoft TMG which is now end-of-support. Then we tried to use IIS as a reverse proxy but that feature was not suitable, especially on video calls where there were many issues. When we started using KEMP, we didn't face a single connectivity or delay issue on Skype for Business.

Previously, when we had maintenance on Exchange Servers, we had to take downtime. Also, whenever there was a glitch in the network our cluster got shifted to the secondary node. With KEMP, we don’t have to take any downtime for maintenance nor do we face any Outlook disconnect issue when there is a network interruption.

The load balancing for Exchange and reverse proxy for Skype are the features I like about it so far.

Reporting and monitoring need serious improvement.

Having LDAP authentication from the LoadMaster to the AD.

Edge Security Pack, because of the way it differentiates between critical infrastructure and the public internet. That, I think, is essential.

They need to improve the UI environment. Currently, it's hard to navigate and use product.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I would rate tech support at nine out of 10.

This is the first such solution we have used.

It has a great price for the solution they offer.

We evaluated Azure but we preferred Kemp.

We do not use this solution on AWS.

When patching Skype for Business Enterprise, we experienced no downtime at all for internal users.

• Skype for Business
• Reverse proxy
• Web application firewall
• Multi-factor authentication 

There is a Forefront TMG replacement together with Skype for Business which even Microsoft recommends for DNS LB. However, customers require uptime, and my tests show that DNS for external users will have quite long time downtimes versus HLB.

• Templates
• More detailed documentation

No issues. It is stable.

No issues. On the VLM, just update the license.

Technical support is very good. They are quick to answer questions and provide online help. 

Simple to install with good documentation. Some documentation is out-of-date versus the new version, and things have been moved.

I have control on the licensing and all the prices since I work for a partner.

KEMP gives away free trials for 30 days. This can be stretched if you want. During the test, you will have access to KEMP support.

We looked into F5 BIG-IP. However, for small customers, they can't pay for four to five days do to basic config.

Look into what you need. Do you want to use virtual (VLM running on Hyper-V or VMware) or physical (LM)?

Load balancing to server farms upon response time performances. Usage of Web Application Firewall module.

There is a simplicity to the setup and configuration. It helps with efficiency and reactivity, in case of assistance needs.

The trio: Simplicity (no needs for many days of training) and a very attractive ratio of price/performance.

SNMP and/or RESTCONF management, in order to collect many counters, for plotting in a central application need to be improved.

High-availability, reverse proxy and web application firewall (WAF) for IoT devices and back-end web services. We have not fully enabled the web application firewall functionality as of yet, but plan to do so in the coming weeks.  

Easy of Deployment. Application Delivery Controllers are not my company's strong suite. We needed a Microsoft Threat Management Gateway server replacement solution for a customer and were impressed with the simplified deployment of the Kemp LoadMasters.

I am small business and cannot afford dedicated consultants for one specific technology. I am able to leverage existing skillsets to deploy and configure the Kemp LoadMasters.

I do not feel we have enough experience with the product to talk to areas improvement or recommended features release.

Some of the support documentation seems to make assumptions that the person installing or configuring is experienced with the product or concepts. Further research got us through the installation and configuration without any issues.  

No issues.

No issues.

High. They have a very responsive support.

Microsoft Threat Management Gateway. Product is at its end of life.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

For a cloud proof of concept, I reached out to Kemp support to help us with a multi-NIC VM deployment. Their support was fantastic and we were able to get up and running in short order. The downloadable templates were a huge time saver.

In-house.

Saved a third of the costs without sacrificing needed features by going with Kemp.

Download Kemp's VLM trial and take it for a test drive; you will be impressed.

Yes, Microsoft Web Application Proxy and F5.

My company is an IT Services Consulting company, and when requirements warrant, I plan on recommending Kemp to our other customers. Note: We currently have no financial interest in recommending Kemp.

Ease of usage and configuration templates to make deployment easy.

I would say overall improvement of the solution features

We have been proposing it to end customers from last July and have been using the Virtual edition.

no

no

no

nil

good

Previously we were proposing Citrix NetScaler or F5. We switched due to cost.

Very straightforward.

Yes, Citrix NetScaler and F5.

Try the VLM edition to get a feeling for the product.

Most interesting features are like geo-redundancy, support of important Microsoft application like Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, Skype for business etc. It also integration with Azure make unique about this tool.

It help to provide efficiently and robust load balance of Exchange servers when one or more server/service failure occurs.

It needs to offer support for more business applications.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There were no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

They are are very knowledgeable and friendly.

They are are very knowledgeable and friendly.

Implementation was easy. We implemented the virtual load balancer and it was a very simple and straightforward installation

I would recommend trying the trial version, and if it meets all your needs then go ahead and implement it.