F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition - GOOD (PAYG, 200Mbps)

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is typically using F5 LTM and GTM, where LTM is for local traffic management and GTM handles different data load balancing. We have two data centers in two different locations, and through BIG-IP GTM, we perform cross-data-center load balancing. In each data center, we have to do unit management, and in total, we have over 100 units, with 60 being virtual editions.

For day-to-day tasks, whatever is operationally needed, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is definitely helping us a lot to keep applications available at all times.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers include iRule, which is the most important feature of F5 LTM. If a feature is directly not available in F5, we can achieve that using iRule, such as logging, redirection, HTTP to HTTPS blocking, and redirection at URI level or content level. These features are exceptional and even persistence-related features help us a lot in day-to-day tasks.

I find the customization feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition particularly useful, along with many other features such as Health Monitor, which we can use to monitor health. If something is not allowed and the application team wants us to blacklist some IPs, we can set up policy region-based controls and achieve that. These are great features of F5.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by simplifying management, as we previously had to manage hardware boxes. Now with the virtual edition, it is easy to use and reliable. We do not find any issues; we have been working with it for the last three to four years and not a single issue has been reported, making it a very reliable and stable product.

I do not wish for any improvements in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition; everything looks good for me. If anything is needed, we raise a ticket, and they take our feedback seriously.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for three years, and I am using F5 LTM virtual edition, which is a great product.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is indeed very stable.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is good; we get immediate responses based on priority.

In this organization, from the beginning, we have been using F5 LTM, but in my previous organization, I used Radware, and I found that F5 LTM edition is a more stable product.

Since moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we are getting a license directly from F5 and have deployed it over our VM, resulting in cost and time savings. Earlier, if hardware was faulty, we had to replace it, but now we simply run our OS over the VM, making it a great product.

My experience with pricing and setup costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was mixed, as they do not have an option for 10 gig licensing, which was costly for us. If they could also provide 5 gig and 6 gig licenses, that would be better.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I did not evaluate other options, as the decision completely came from the sales team. They asked for feedback, and since the feedback was great, I am not completely aware of the commercial part, but for us, it is serving our purpose with no issues.

A specific scenario where F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped solve a challenge for me is its ability to achieve high availability and make applications always available. It provides application-level availability, monitoring the health of applications. We even have the option to check the content and actual application status, allowing us to monitor the response code, which are great features of F5 LTM, making my work easier.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it is a reliable and stable product; they can definitely go for F5 LTM.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is to manage a lot of implementations across many sites. I have implemented it as LTM for local traffic management or application delivery control. I have multiple services on multiple servers and need to load balance between these servers.

After that, I have also implemented it as ASM, another module, application security manager, which acts as a WAF  solution for these services.

The modules LTM and ASM help my organization day-to-day by increasing performance and balancing loads across multiple servers to help our customers. I need a very good load balancer because I have multiple services and servers providing a single service. Additionally, ASM secures these services as a WAF  solution.

I have published my services to the internet to allow customers to browse our services and websites, so I need a very good WAF solution that is always updated and capable of stopping complex attacks. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  provides these solutions, particularly with ASM and Advanced WAF, which have a lot of features and licenses. I first deployed F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a virtual edition alongside LTM and ASM.

In my experience, the best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers include stability and credential stuffing protection, along with a full proxy for layer seven, allowing it to load balance till layer seven and on any port. This versatility is very good compared to FortiWeb, which only supports HTTP and HTTPS, making F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition a superior product for load balancing and WAF solutions.

My experience with the credential stuffing protection feature has been positive. It provides updates about username and password exposure on the darknet and deep web, alerting me when credentials are found outside my organization, which is a crucial function. I feel I can rely on F5, a big vendor, for security. Additionally, the load balancer's ability to load balance till layer seven on all ports is impressive.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition positively impacts my organization by increasing performance, allowing users to access my servers, and facilitating my publishing to those servers. I enjoy secure and high-performance web services for my customers, which is my main use case to protect my websites while allowing users to access them securely. Since implementing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I have noticed fewer security incidents, improved uptime, and measurable changes in speed and customer satisfaction.

I believe that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, whether virtual or hardware, needs improvement in the logging module. There are many issues, and accessing the CLI to remove older logs to see new ones is cumbersome. I have mentioned this multiple times and opened support tickets, hoping it can be resolved in future versions.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for one year.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's scalability is good but needs improvement.

The customer support from F5 is very professional. I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I used FortiWeb, but I switched to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because FortiWeb only supported load balancing for HTTP and HTTPS.

The initial setup and configuration of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are very good. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has a great GUI and concept; everyone in the IT field first learns about load balancing through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Most of my team holds certifications for F5 implementations.

I handle updates and patch management for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition by reaching out to support, downloading the ISO file, then uploading it to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and upgrading it using this ISO. It is a simple process.

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as it secures my organization with WAF solutions against web attacks while enabling me to publish and load balance multiple servers with a single VIP.

The setup cost for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is reasonable, as my team is certified and skilled in implementations. However, the software or product itself is on the higher cost side, but I see a good return on investment for this product.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I evaluated other options, specifically FortiWeb.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has integrated with my existing security tools by sending logs and flows from F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to IBM QRadar  as syslog and NetFlow.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition handles high availability and failover in my environment with two units in active standby. I create a device group where one unit is active and the other is secondary. After configuring the active unit, I push the configurations to the secondary unit, so when maintenance is needed or if the active VM goes down, the passive unit quickly becomes active, handling all traffic for my customers.

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to implement it in a well-structured manner; having a detailed design before implementation will be very useful. For example, creating internal and external VLANs can help in future expansions. I would rate this product a ten on a scale of one to ten.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is for LTM and GTM. For LTM, I use it for load balancing, and GTM is for global load balancing, which functions as intelligent DNS.

Let's suppose we have one application abc.com. We create an alias on abc.gslb.com and forward that traffic to a CNAME, which in turn forwards the traffic to the GTM. The GTM does the load balancing between the data centers. Sometimes it is active-active, and sometimes it is an active-standby setup similar to DCDR, depending on the requirement and application team requests. After that, if there is a disaster at some data center, such as power issues, the standby data center will serve that purpose. This really increases our availability and performance of the application, and we are receiving fewer complaints, almost none.

My use case is known mainly for the GTM and LTM.

The best feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is SSL offloading. There are different methods to deploy an application at Layer 2 and Layer 3 setup. Based on the requirement, we do that, so it is a complete ADC  application delivery control, providing all the solutions that the application team needs.

A particular feature I need in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is iRule redirection. If they need SSL offloading or pass-through, or bridging, all kinds of solutions are available. Based on the requirement, we can fulfill those needs, even with GTM topology, which can be active-active or active-standby. In load balancing, there are different methods, so ratios and all can be easily configured as per the requirement. It works as a full proxy architecture, so it has the full capability to understand the request and response.

Another feature of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that stands out to me is that it is template-based. For rapid deployment, if we need to create hundreds or thousands of VIPs at the same time, we can use iApp and scripting to do that easily. These are the major features, and for automation, we can easily manage that through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization. Without LTM, there is a single point of failure. Since we have LTM, we are protecting our application. Previously we faced DoS attacks, and through iRule, we blocked those IPs. This iRule is a great feature, and now with our LTM, we are not exposing our actual server on the internet. Instead, we are exposing our VIP IP, providing security and scalability. We have the flexibility to add or remove servers as needed.

Regarding specific metrics or outcomes, earlier if one of the servers went down, there was a significant impact. Since F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a smart device, it can monitor the services and applications irrespective of the port, checking whether the application is available or not. It is significantly reducing downtime. If any server is causing an issue, such as if the service is running but the internal application has crashed, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition will mark that server as down and will not send traffic to it. This increases performance and availability, building trust with clients, which directly translates into revenue. If there is reputational loss, we can lose money as well for the organization. We send our solutions to other vendors and recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a great product that everyone should need.

Improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition should include training for newcomers. If they are not aware, it can be beneficial for them to learn. In authentication, there is currently a single method to add a single IP. Adding a fallback IP would also help. I am not sure if that feature will be included in the upcoming version, but I am still using an older version where that feature is not available.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for approximately five years, and I have been working on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition LTM virtual editions.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to definitely go with the full potential of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition LTM. It is a great product that will make your life easier and reduce costs. They provide great support, and the TAC team is there whenever needed. You can log a case and they will help.

I am currently using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  for LTM and GTM purposes across two data centers. For load balancing between the data centers, I use GTM, and within a data center, load balancing is handled by LTM.

For a critical application, we have created an active standby setup using GTM. If something happens with DC1, traffic will automatically be transferred to DC2. For the LTM use case, we have an application such as abc.com with 50 servers behind it, and we perform load balancing between those servers.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  offers exceptional features, primarily SSL Offloading and redirection, which I use on most of the VIPs.

SSL Offloading helps when I need to perform content inspection, and redirection allows me to redirect traffic since we do not accept traffic on port 80 and want to direct it to port 443. In scenarios where we need to redirect to a maintenance page, redirection is invaluable. When the team requires client IPs in a layer two setup, I create an iRule, which serves as another use case for logging purposes. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition does not provide client IP by default, so I enable logging through iRule to address this need, making these truly awesome features.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by ensuring application availability and reliability while avoiding a single point of failure through LTM and GTM. If anything goes wrong, traffic is simply redirected to a different data center. When one server goes down, LTM does not send traffic to that server, and it also helps me increase server capacity. If I need to patch and do not want to send traffic to a particular server, I can simply remove it from the pool.

Using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, specifically the LTM, has significantly reduced downtime. Previously, if any server went down, there was an outage, but now with load balancing, I can check the application status irrespective of services through health monitoring. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable with no issues regarding reliability or downtime.

To improve F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, specifically LTM, I believe that when creating an LDAP server, there is only one option to add an LDAP. If there were a secondary option to add two LDAP server IPs, that would be extremely helpful.

The primary needed improvement for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is the addition of the LDAP option.

I have already evaluated F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's scalability by defining the CPU and size accordingly.

I have worked on other solutions before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during my time in a service-based company.

I have seen a return on investment from using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as it is saving our time and money. In business terms, we are not losing business, and customers are relying on and trusting our services, which is why they are paying us. We are saving money by providing availability at all times.

I do not have visibility into the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as this part is handled by management. However, I have worked on support costs, and I believe that the support costs are reasonable compared to other vendors.

Before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we evaluated other options such as Radware. However, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is more cost-effective and better in every aspect, plus it is user-friendly.

I would definitely recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to others so they can opt for this option.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is as an LTM, which means load balancer, and also as an APM , which means Access Policy Manager, to distribute traffic to endpoints and provide security features including authentications with SAML features that provide authentication using SSL certificates.

A specific example of how I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  as a load balancer is by hosting it on a virtual server with multiple services, where I can place the LTM load balancer before or after a router or firewall to distribute traffic equally among servers handling the same service.

I have only one year of experience and need to grow in my understanding of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The best feature F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers is the APM  providing authentication with certificates, ensuring that every user or tenant needs to be registered on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's APM to access the service.

The certificate matching process works in practice by making the environment secure as unknown users cannot access the service unless their certification keys match with the service certification.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped me complete tasks faster with fewer errors, and it makes onboarding easier for new users because its well-designed graphical user interface that freshers can easily adopt.

I believe F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved, but I do not have specific improvements to share due to my limited experience with the product. There is no need for improvements in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as it already has an adequate interface to work on.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition since last year.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable, and I have not faced any downtime because our setup is active-passive.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is highly scalable; there is no downtime regarding reliability and scalability since we can set it up as an HA pair, where if the active goes down, the passive takes over seamlessly.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very good; they quickly resolve any difficulties I face, and I appreciate their support.

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it handles traffic well and provides centralized management for certificates, efficiently managing L4 and Layer 7 load distribution and reducing CPU load on backend servers. I would rate this product 9.5 out of 10.