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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Score9.6 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

What is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.

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Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

What users are saying about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
View all F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

Pros

  • Robust and industry-standard load balancing for diverse applications.
  • Efficient SSL/TLS offloading for secure traffic processing.
  • Exceptional application performance with low latency.

Cons

  • User interface (GUI) and navigation are often considered unintuitive.
  • Configuration and management can be complex, requiring CLI for advanced features.
  • Adaptability and flexibility in public cloud deployments need improvement.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Incentivized
Jonathan MongeauView profile
Network Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at PNC Bank (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is the backbone of our organization’s traffic management system and delivers phenomenal performance for the multitude of services we rely upon internally and globally. As a financial services company, we require solutions that provide reliable performance and quality and F5 has been able to deliver. The other end of this is when things go badly; the ability to address problems within the BIG-IP ecosystem is considerably easier because the experience is catered towards engineers like myself where we need the telemetry and data to quickly diagnose problems.

Pros

  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Quality support

Cons

  • The user experience within the WEBUI

Return on Investment

  • I’m not in a position to say anything on this matter

Usability

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Review

Incentivized
Rob SutherlinView profile
Sr. Network Engineer in Information Technology at Xcel Energy (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) or all of our applications across multiple environments - some of which require strict regulation and cannot openly communicate between the two environments. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) allows us to create application resiliency, security and reporting.

Pros

  • Load balancing
  • traffic processing through irules
  • SNAT configurations

Cons

  • renaming VIPS if they are incorrectly made. You have to delete the VIP and start over from the beginning
  • Logging can get very chatty

Return on Investment

  • It has allowed us to let application developers know that the issues are with their application and not due to the network, because of where it sits. This has been invaluable when troubleshooting issues when they arise. Knowing whether or not traffic is even hitting the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), either ingress or outgoing. If the Dev's information is not even making it to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), we can quickly tell them and let them figure the issue out on their own, saving the rest of the Network Team from getting that 2am call.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

NetScaler and Citrix Gateway

Other Software Used

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall), F5 BIG-IP, F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator

Big-IP LTM rocks

Incentivized
Thiago Cardoso
Network engineer in Information Technology at GE (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use F5 Big-IP LTM in my organization to load balance Apps with onPrem and Cloud pool members.

Pros

  • Exceptional Performance
  • Very good handling SSL
  • Security

Cons

  • It would be nice if I could just rename an object such as VIP. It is not cool when I need to delete and re-create an object just because I want to change its name.
  • I would like to be able to see orphans objects directly from GUI, not just from ihealth.
  • I would like to be able to delete VIPs and associated objects in a single shot from GUI.
  • GUI could have a `make a wish` button

Return on Investment

  • Not able to provide numbers but LTM had improved tremendously the Apps availbility

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure Load Balancer

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Incentivized
Sameer Sutikshan
Network Engineer in Information Technology at Canadian Tire (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using this product as a matter of LTM, application delivery, and it addresses problems like SSL, offloading, bridging, and it gives more control on the client side, on the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, not on the servers.

Pros

  • So this product does the certification, the client, SSL, the TCP, the STTP profile, the search and keys and all of that stuff.

Cons

  • We can improve this product in OCSP, stapling, CRL revocation list, cipher controls, and that's about it.

Return on Investment

  • It has a lot of positive impact. It made application deployment pretty simple and easy

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) review

Incentivized
Hrishi Pachlag
Cloud Arch in Engineering at NICE System Ltd (5001-10,000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We extensively utilize LTM to handle the majority of our web and API customer traffic, distributing requests across our web and API server pools for load balancing and high availability. SSL inspection and validation are performed on incoming traffic to ensure secure communications.

Pros

  • Extensive SSL Check
  • Path redirect
  • multiple load balancing options

Cons

  • LTM fail over
  • Cloud deployments Active standby deployments

Return on Investment

  • cloud costing is more, with Cloud base LBs we can save a lot compare to F5

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Brocade VDX (discontinued) and Azure Application Gateway

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