LoadBalancer Enterprise Reviews

We are using this solution for internet management. We have approximately eight incoming ISP lines. All of the ISP lines go to the load balancer.

We use it for normal internet access.

It doesn't have the bonding capability feature.

I would like to see the bonding capability feature included and it should be easier to upgrade. The capacity that we currently have is 2G. 

If we could upgrade it using the same device, we could upgrade it twice without changing the hardware, that would be easier for us.

It should be scalable without changing the hardware.

We have been using this solution for approximately six years.

We are using the same version that we have been using for the last six years.

For now, it's stable.

Currently, it is not scalable. We have already reached our limit.

We were supposed to increase our capacity to four gigs, but now we are one gig. To upgrade, we would have to go with all new hardware.

We have approximately 2,000 users in our organization.

So far, we have not had any problems.

Previously, we did not use another solution. Loadbalancer.org is the only one that I have used.

The installation was completed through our vendors.

The installation was easy, not very difficult. It is easy to install.

We are planning to change to another load balancer with the bonding capability feature. 

I would recommend this solution to others, but it would be better if it had the bonding capability.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It helps us to route the traffic to the available servers. If we didn't have Loadbalancer we would fail to set the end-user and it would cause a failure in the cluster. We protect the cluster with Loadbalancer. It checks all of the nodes in the backend, in the fabric. If you enable the monitor it will set an alarm in the server. When a user gets an application, this alarm alerts the user.

The configuration of Azure is a lot more simple than with Loadbalancer. It was very simple to configure it. There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience. 

I have been using Loadbalancer for six months. 

So far we haven't had any bugs or glitches with Loadbalancer. 

I haven't needed to contacted technical support yet. 

The deployment took two to three hours. I did the deployment myself. 

I would recommend this solution. It's a market leader. The admin should know the product well before configuring it. They need experience. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten out of ten because of the complex configuration. 

Load-balancing a web application server. It's a requirement for the application which we're using, which is why we bought the hardware. It does its job. We don't touch it.

We couldn't use our line-of-business software without it. It sits in front of it and it just does its job. It's an unsung hero, I'm afraid. It just does what it does. It plods along everyday, and when it breaks, it gets fixed really quickly.

The SSL Layer 7 load balancing.

Obviously the simple ones like price. Make it cheaper, make it faster. Other than that, it's a spot-on product. It doesn't have any issues; no wishes or wants with it at all.

Originally we had some stability issues with it, so they replaced it with a new box and it's fine.

It's basically as scalable as you want it to be. We're not using it at any great scale so unfortunately I can't really comment too much on it, but it's pretty scalable.

The support is amazing. The product itself is pretty simple to be honest. It's the support which is the differentiator for the product. The company has an excellent support team, 24-hour support. It's excellent, second to none.

Straightforward. I plugged it in and the guys did the rest. Just plug it in, give it an IP address, give it access, and it's done.

The appliances have not really had a measurable effect on our operating costs.

Pricing is great. I couldn't really complain about it. It's all good. They're not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but I think value-wise, they're 100%. 

We evaluated a few beforehand, however Loadbalancer.org was the one which was recommended to us by our software providers. They just told us it was the best one for us, so that's why we chose it.

We evaluated KEMP, F5, and Windows Integrated Load Balancer.

For what it is and what it does, it's not a very glamorous piece of kit. It's a load balancer, it takes the connection and decides where to put it, to another server or somewhere else. It's the speed at which it can do it and the fact that when it does go wrong - and obviously things do happen - how quickly and how well the company resolves it. Those are the two things which make us stick with and recommend it to anyone else. 

Most people, if they need a load balancer, they know that they need a load balancer. It's not something which you can just say, "Oh yeah, I was talking to the guy in the pub, and he said, 'Oh you really need to get one of these.'" It's quite a very specific requirement to have one. But if anyone does need one, absolutely, it's bang on.

Give it a go. They're great.

The Loadbalancer.org appliance sits directly behind our firewall, terminates all of our SSL/HTTP traffic and then directs it to the backend servers depending on the requested service.

This has allowed us to use multiple NATD back end web servers with one single public IP Address and different domain names whilst keeping our services up and running.

SSL Termination with Server Name Indicator option to a Layer 7 back end web farm which allows the client IP address to still be passed.

HTTP API would be really helpful, but they do have a command line api which is used over a SSH connection

We have not, as of yet, had any issues with the stability of the units.

We have not had any problems with scalability.

Customer Service:

The customer service and tech team are basically the same within Loadbalancer.org.

Technical Support:

The technical support at Loadbalancer.org is possibly one of the best that I have had to deal with and it is 24/7, too. They do not always know the answer right away, but you can be sure that they will support you through to a working solution.

HAProxy, we needed a maintenance and the support agreement as we were outgrowing our in-house knowledge.

The basic setup of the unit was straightforward. Once services are up and running, you can then change some of the advanced settings, which are not shown to start with.

The cost of the hardware units was talked over with the sales team, who then helped to ensure that we had the correct unit size and support cost at the start of the project. We have since upgraded our license and this was just the difference between the original and the new license.

We also looked at Kemp. Before this, we were using an in-house version of HAProxy, but ended up needing support.

The Loadbalancer.org product has helped reduce our tech teams time on manual maintenance of our load balancer and the development of the product is ever evolving.

We load balance our customer billing and information system, as well as our Exchange services with it.

We had a requirement for these applications to be load balanced. Without a dedicated load balancer, we would have had to use a Round Robin DNS, which does not have any health checking, notifications, etc. We now get notifications when pool members go down, and we eliminate our downtime by not sending traffic to downed pool members.

A load balancer is a load balancer, in terms of functionality. I need the interface to be easy to use for my team members who have not spent hours working on it, so I am not the only person who can operate it.

I would like a notification when a new version of the software is available. They told me to sign up for their newsletter, but I have not received any notification for a newer software version.

No stability issues.

Not yet.

Their technical support is one of the best experiences that I have ever had. We have even had a need for custom health checks, and they have really risen to the challenge.

We have used F5 in the past. They are incredibly fantastic, but they are so expensive. We went with LoadBalancer.org because we did not need the bells and whistles of F5. Also, we did not want to pay the premium price.

For someone who has never set up load balancers before, I can attest that if you familiarize yourself with the concepts of load balancing (and their documentation lays out these concepts very well), you can set up one of these in a matter of an hour. It really is an easy process.

Since the load balancer appliances are comparatively inexpensive, I imagine they have given us ROI. We paid significantly less for these than we would have for their competitors. However, since the systems we load balance were new systems, it is hard to measure the ROI. 

It filled a requirement for our project, and it did so at lesser cost than their competitors.

It is inexpensive, and even their “unlimited” version, the VA MAX is still far cheaper than competitors. I love that they do not price on some arbitrary throughput rating where you are guessing at what the load balancer is going to handle. These guys make their pricing scheme really easy.

We proceeded a long way down the road with F5, then decided to go a different direction shortly before the production environment was built.

For load balancers, these guys are perfect. If you need a lot more bells and whistles, you may need a more expensive product. Tell the sales guys at Loadbalancer.org your needs, but do your research. Set up a trial device. Make sure you do not need a more full-featured product. Loadbalancer.org is improving their product all the time, but know what you are getting into.

We are a supplier of medical healthcare IT solutions with a focus on radiology departments. We use it to create a redundant solution with automatic failover.

We use the hardware and the software version of the Loadbalancer.org product line.

The load balancers have an easy installation and a relatively simple, easy user interface to use, which is valuable because it is not the core business of our engineers to configure network devices. With basic network knowledge, our required system functionality can be configured and maintained.

The automatic refresh of the System Overview webpage: It sometimes has an extra webpage reload (after a change) before you see it is executed. This can be confusing.

Also, possibly a more graphical overview page (with colors) to give a two second overview to see if everything is working fine.

Not so far. It seems to be very stable. In the past, we had issues with the Secure Digital (SD) cards which got corrupted and prevented the system to restart. I think this is better with the new line.

No scalability issues.

Their technical support is very supportive and knowledgeable.

No previous solution was used.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I do not know if my company evaluated other solutions.

Web filtering and load balancing.

They balance a lot better than the last set that we had. The previous load balancers made some bad decisions with allocating the load, and they would basically overload one of the single nodes behind. These, from loadbalancer.org, tend to balance it on a much better basis. The two factors, or the two features, you want in a load balancer, mostly, are high-availability and balancing the load. The last ones and these ones are both high-availability, but these ones balance a lot better than the last ones did.

The most important feature is the fact it was recommended by the supplier. The previous load balancers weren't a very good match for what we were trying to do.

They work. It just keeps going. The vendor will set them up, and they've just been trouble-free. They've just worked. They just keep going. That's what the principal purpose of the load balancer is, to work around and be available when there's any outages with the cluster behind. They just keep going, which is exactly what we want them for.

They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers, whereas the previous ones were.

In terms of balancing other traffic, that they don't already balance, that would be a useful thing. I actually logged a call with their support, because I needed to try and work out how we were going to do it. That's when they came back and told me, "No, we don't actually do that." But it's something they're planning to do in the future.

They've been rock solid. They're stable, we definitely use them within their capabilities. They are very good on that.

No issues with scalability, not at all. They are very capable. We only use a tiny fraction of what they're capable of doing. 

It's absolutely outstanding. They have a web chat feature, which I've used a number of times. And they've always been very responsive and very knowledgeable. They've sorted things out on the spot.

We did have a previous solution. We switched because of the supplier's recommendation, which we don't regret. Not at all. These are much better. The other ones weren't doing the job very well.

The "original, original" setup was very complex, and in the it end didn't work. We run a Smoothwall cluster behind the load balancers, which is for web filtering. The original design that was implemented didn't work the way that it was meant to, because of interactions with the firewall. We did things differently to the way they normally do things, and that actually broke their design. 

So we basically had to roll it back to a simplified setup. But that wasn't any fault of the load balancer, or any fault of the Smoothwall. It's just the way that the whole project was done. We didn't tell them exactly what we wanted, and they went on what they thought it was going to be, and that just didn't match.

So the setup is notably complex. We did need their support for the original setup as well.

In terms of saving money, they haven't really made a difference to our operating costs. It's not a cost-saving device.

I have no idea, because I don't have anything to do with pricing. It was basically, "We need these, we need these," and then that's what happened. We got them. I had nothing to do with the negotiation on the price.

Basically you've got load balancers in the front and then you've got a number of machines that sit behind it that actually do the work. The load balancers just allocate out the work. So the people that manage the system behind the load balancers, this is their preferred solution. They managed to get us them for a very good price.

We had load balancers from before, that were just kicking around, so we used the ones that we had before, and they weren't a very good match. Then the supplier said, "Use these instead," and that's what we did. They were afforded somehow, (I have no idea how that money was found, or how much they cost or anything like that). But we switched over to what they said and haven't looked back.

Plan your specifications and features carefully. It's about doing proper planning to make sure that they will actually fit your requirements.

The owner of the company writes a very extensive and detailed blog. I would suggest any other potential customers read it, that they read the owner's blog, to understand what the company is focused on and where their priorities lie. Beyond just the product marketing and materials, you can actually see where the owner of the company wants them to be going, and what they're doing. And that might help focus you on whether it's the right product for what you're trying to achieve.

Load balancing Exchange, print servers, our call desk software, and SharePoint.

It means that if one of our mail-servers falls over, it's a much more seamless process. Or if we need to do maintenance on one of them, we can take it out of the Loadbalancer in a controlled fashion so that users don't notice that there's been a problem, or that maintenance is going on. They continue business as usual. It's made end-users' experience much better.

• Reliability 
• High availability

At the moment, I can't think of anything. For what we use it for, it does everything we need it to. It does it well and it doesn't have any trouble, so I can't think of anything that I would change. 

No issues with stability. The only time we ever take it offline is when we do firmware upgrades on it, but that's in a controlled fashion. In seven years, we've not had any unexpected downtime at all.

When you do a manual failover, no one seems to notice it. It's a seamless thing, which obviously helps.

We have about 30,000 connections going through at any one time and it's fine, it doesn't seem to sweat. It doesn't get overloaded.

With this company, it's the best that I've experienced. They actually phone you back.

This is the first one that we bought, and it's the one we stuck with.

It's not complex. They provide very helpful guides on their websites for the things that we load-balance. We just followed the guides which were accurate and easy to follow. They're pretty good from that perspective.

While it's increased our uptime, we don't really justify cost as time - if that makes sense - so it's difficult to quantify.

We've got an unlimited license, which doesn't costs that much compared to other vendors, and we don't have to buy it again. The other thing they did was they gave us a free virtual appliance, so we paid for two and got three.

Buy what you need, or a little bit more than you need. Like I said, we've not had any trouble with them, we've bought the unlimited appliance and we're just using it, and we've not hit any limits.

We evaluated a couple of others and then decided to go with Loadbalancer. We evaluated KEMP, Zen, and F5.

I would say, go for it. It has proved to be a pretty reliable system, it hasn't let us down. Try to break it.

We've never had any trouble with it. And when I've had to speak to support about firmware upgrades and things like that, they either do it for you or they give you guides and it just works. It's probably few and far between, with regards to things that actually do what it says on the tin. There's a lot of stuff out there at the moment that says it does everything but it doesn't. This is one of the few that actually does it.

We provide a web-filtering system for 200 schools, and Loadbalancer.org makes sure that it balances across all of the web-filtering service that we've got, to provide good quality service.

It was part of a project that we did where we used to outsource all of the web-filtering to a third party. We weren't very happy with it. We wanted to bring everything in-house, control the system ourselves. This is an absolute key component to being able to allow us to do that. It's enabled us to have much better service to offer at a cheaper price, and much more resilient.

Most important for us that it makes sure that the load is distributed and that we always have access to the end-servers that they're connected to. We need that to make sure that we have a consistent, high level of service that the schools can rely on.

We've had a couple of minor issues in the two years they've been running, a couple of very small glitches. 

No we haven't had any scalability issues. We've installed them, installed the devices from day one, and they've worked absolutely fine.

In those cases where we had small glitches, whenever we contacted the support team, they've been absolutely fantastic.

We weren't really using anything ourselves because we were doing it through a third-party contract previously, but we switched to Loadbalancer.org at the recommendation of our web-filtering partners.

It was actually our partner who set them up for us, so we didn't have anything to do with it directly. But in our case, yes, it was straightforward.

The appliances have had a measurable effect on our operating costs. I wouldn't be able to put a finger on it as such, but yes, they've definitely helped.

I'd say it is very good value.

To be honest, our filtering partners said that they had done that work previously themselves, they had tried and tested, and they recommended Loadbalancer.org. So we just went with their recommendation. We, ourselves, didn't evaluate anything else, but I know that they have. They'd be in a much better place than us to do those evaluations.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We have had one or two small crashes on them, nothing major, but I guess that would be the only thing stopping it from being a 10.

I would say that, from the experience that we've had, the devices, operation, and the support from the technical support teams, that I can't fault it. I can't fault the systems. I'd happily recommend them.

It's just worked. It's been a good system. We were advised to purchase it and it was good advice. I'd say that it's been absolutely 100% brilliant for us, and I wouldn't think twice about recommending them.

Load balance http and https requests, our customer service.

It has relieved the load on our team so we can focus on other aspects of the operation.

When we do load balancing, the customer does not know that this particular node is down because the load balancing hides it from them. So, from a customer point of view, they have what I would call an unbreakable service. The service is continuous. Now, on our end, because of the load balancer, we can actually hide it from them, move to another server and bring the bad server offline. So it does improve our SLA with the customer.

Ease of use and support.

The user interface precludes need to be well versed with Linux IPVS command line. This make it easy for junior team members to participate in managing load balancing needs. 

The support especially helps us with quick remote fixes. With a remote fix, I can view the fix in real time and yet ease security concerns for my supervisor. We had a few issues and they responded immediately. They came in remotely and fixed them. Everything is really good from the customer service point of view, which is what we expected it to be.

It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, to somehow extract the data and chart it for this appliance, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service.

Right now, there's no way for us to extract the data. So from that point of view, we can see it on the user interface but we cannot extract out the chart or the data.

No issues with stability. There were a few issues in the past, probably due to configurations. The support guy came in remotely and helped us to fix it. It's stable, it's in production nonstop.

So far no issues with scalability. It was easy to upgrade the license for unlimited clusters and servers.

When we bought the product, we got a lower tier version that had a limitation on the clusters. Then we upgraded to unlimited clusters due to our needs and it has been good. We have not made the limit of the unlimited clusters yet.

Super. They are good. They know what they are doing. They're responsive.

I used Linux IPVS in a previous job. It is not user friendly. It required much more hands-on knowledge. You need your command line, you need to fix things. With the Loadbalancer.org solution, on top of the command line they have a fancy GUI that makes it more user-friendly.

Straightforward. It's just a hardware setup. You just click on a few buttons in the GUI and everything is fine.

I really don't know for sure, as we previously used Round Robin DNS. I think it is likely immeasurable, as the business revenue depends a lot on the load balancer. We cannot live without it.

You can start with the base appliance R20 first and upgrade to the MAX version if necessary.

Their pricing is good. We are looking at it from a customer point of view. Customer downtime costs us money. So the pricing is is fair. They have good service and I recommend the company.

KEMP LoadMaster.

Implement major changes during the appropriate support hours so you can get support if things don't work out correctly.

Start out with the limited, restricted option first. Because to upgrade to the unlimited option, you just call customer service and get your license changed. That would help some small businesses. So if they evaluate, and they find that they need more, they just update their license and they get unlimited clusters. So that way they are saving, if they want to be cautious.