Positive F5 BIG-IP experience for new deployment
February 26, 2025

Positive F5 BIG-IP experience for new deployment

Michael Friedman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with F5 BIG-IP

We use F5 BIG-IP for standard LTM load balancing with some GTM/DNS geo-location for cross data center services. F5 BIG-IP provides SSL security and general application load balancing for most of our infrastructure services.

Pros

  • Consistent deployment structure for vservers
  • Highly customizable profiles with straight-forward inheritance
  • Flexible deployment model (VE, hardware, etc.)

Cons

  • Easier support for multiple pools behind a vserver
  • Better documentation on features/options under configurations
  • Object UUID model or similar to allow flexibility in renaming objects
  • Improve cli stat data and ability to view running configurations
  • Ease of deployment in migrating from previous vendor
  • Cost savings and feature/scale flexibility with FCP
Overall, the UI has a very straightforward interface, and features are laid out well with good linking between connected services. Parent/Inheritance based profiles allow for maintaining a standard structure across all applications while also allowing flexibility to customize for apps that require something unique. General statistic visibility and vserver load in the monitoring pages provides good in the moment insights on load when investigating performance issues.

Do you think F5 BIG-IP delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with F5 BIG-IP's feature set?

Yes

Did F5 BIG-IP live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of F5 BIG-IP go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy F5 BIG-IP again?

Yes

We migrated our entire fleet to F5 BIG-IP from another vendor in a very short period of time. The logical layout of the, albeit dated UI, made jumping in to the platform as a novice very easy to do. The straightforward profile management and inheritance based settings made adapting consistent profiles across applications easy to do.

F5 BIG-IP Feature Ratings

Using F5 BIG-IP

300 - Application support teams that run their infrastructure and limited e-commerce applications behind vservers running on F5 BIG-IP LTM. These are application owners who will enable and disable pool members in their applications.
30 - Network infrastructure team that supports the management and deployment of applications on F5 BIG-IP.
  • SSL offload and end to end encrypted connections
  • Application load balancing
  • ISE authentication load balancing
  • LDAP and DNS service load balancing
  • Looking at vserver and configuration baseline automation
So far experience with F5 BIG-IP has been good, but we are only 6 months into the deployment and will depend on how things run over time.

Evaluating F5 BIG-IP and Competitors

Yes - NetScaler based on a change in behavior by Citrix with our contract.
  • Scalability
  • Ease of Use
We were looking to maintain a hardware based solution for our on-prem deployments that provided performance and capacity with a minimal footprint.
Would definitely have a longer lead time to evaluate all competitors. Would dig more into the automation of services on the platforms and ease of tying into deployment pipelines.

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