Barracuda Load Balancers, Balancing Bang for your Buck
March 24, 2017
Barracuda Load Balancers, Balancing Bang for your Buck
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Barracuda Load Balancer
We are currently using our Barracuda Load Balancer for both Sharepoint and Exchange traffic balancing and also using it as a reverse proxy service. The load balancer allows us to both balance traffic for both Sharepoint and Exchange and also helps us to perform maintenance on the servers without user downtime. The reverse proxy features have worked well as we transition away from Microsoft TMG servers that are no longer supported. This dual functionality has helped with both our high availability and has helped us to eliminate the old TMG servers. We are currently planning adding additional web traffic balancing and also integrating it with our vdi environment.
- The reporting and interface to configure the load balancer are detailed but still intuitive and easy to manage.
- The configuration wizards, along with Barracuda's listing of configuration templates/instructions on their support page, make configuration relatively quick and easy.
- Reporting allows us to easily monitor our workloads, which the load balancer has been handling without any issues or slowdowns. We also had no problems setting the load balancer to export logs to our central logging solution.
- The couple of times that we needed assistance, support was extremely efficient and helpful. I really like that i can go online, open a ticket, and schedule a time for support to call me.
- The configuration settings are relatively granular, but instructions often only list the necessary fields, so if you need some custom settings it can be a little hunt and find what you need.
- Their support knowledge base page has instructions, but it can be difficult to navigate. There are different versions for different generations of both the barracuda devices and also the connecting software. (looking for setting up the Microsoft Exchange Load balancing can get you different instructions for each level of load balancer and also each version of Exchange).
- The internal logging review screens and settings can take a while to get used to how it is structured. It can also take a few tries to configure the service logging to get the type of information you'd like.
- Barracuda has allowed us to get the load balancing we needed for Sharepoint and Exchange traffic (replaced Microsoft NLB and DNS round robin) and we were able to get 2 devices (set in high availability) for close to what the other bigger load balancing companies were offereing for 1 device.
- Barracuda also replaced our TMG reverse proxy for a couple separate web services. The TMG's were out of support and we needed a solution to replace them. When looking we saw that Barracuda could do the work and in a day we were able to set them up. This saved us from having to find a separate reverse proxy solution and helped eliminate 2 other devices.
- It has also saved us in after hours work, as we can take a portion of Sharepoint or Exchange offline to update and patch servers during the normal day.
We also had looked at Kemp and F5. The Kemp and F5 had a lot of horsepower and advanced configuration and functionality. When we looked at our workload and how we were planning on using the load balancers, we really didn't need all those extra bells and whistles. Barracuda provided all the standard functionality we needed and were looking for and did so at a greatly reduced price point.