F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager LTM Review
April 30, 2025
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager LTM Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Well, LTM is an application traffic load balancer. We use it both internally and externally for load balancing, external inbound applications and internal applications among different services, either within the same data center or within different data centers.
Pros
- Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
Cons
- Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
- For the most part, I mean we used it for internal purposes for load balancing, internal services, some external, it allows better uptime for one. I mean that's the primary purpose that use the load balancing form because we didn't need it for scalability, we did it for uptime just to basically have multiple redundant services that allowed our users to actually have just one point of entry on without having to do more cumbersome redundancy solution. That was the main value proposition for us.
Obviously NetScaler, because we had that functionality, we just turned it on. We were only using it for our Citrix farms and we migrated all of our F5 uses over to the NetScalers. So simply because that was, other than buying the product, which the actual NetScaler themselves were cheap. I mean it cost us like $60,000 for all of them for the hardware. We were already licensed for it, so it was a no-brainer. We didn't have a choice. Definitely a superior product. A lot more functionality, particularly in corner cases where you might need to make some specific traffic tweaks. I would say that the NetScaler doesn't do nearly as good a job with that traffic filtering. You only really get URI filtering with NetScaler. You don't have the flexibility, the eye rolls or the complexity of the eye rolls, so that's a negative too.
Do you think F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)'s feature set?
Yes
Did F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) again?
Yes
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation