F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition - BETTER (PAYG, 25Mbps)

Most of my experience with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been around deploying it in virtualized setups for application load balancing, traffic management, and security use cases, supporting critical systems rather than just testing or labs. I have primarily used it in production and virtual environments.

We have a lot of internally hosted applications for our internal team members across the board, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped us with that. All of these are very big infrastructure, very big environments. We have deployed it as the primary load balancer in front of multiple application servers to distribute traffic evenly, handle SSL offloading to reduce server load, and also to monitor application health and automatically fail over unhealthy instances.

In our environment, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is deployed as a virtual appliance within our virtualization platform. It sat in front of our core web applications and backend services, acting as the primary load balancer and traffic management, especially in the traffic management layer. We have configured it in a HA setup to avoid single points of failure. It handled SSL termination and distributed traffic. From a network perspective, it was placed in a segmented zone between the external facing layer and the internal servers, ensuring controlled and secure traffic flow.

We are using VMware supporting our internal and customer-facing applications for the deployment of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

There are a few features within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that really did stand out in day-to-day production use. SSL offloading has been a big one for us, followed by application health monitoring. Adding to that, overall traffic management features such as intelligent load balancing and session persistence helped keep performance consistent even during peak usage. Together, those features are what really made the platform reliable and production ready for us. SSL offloading, health monitoring, and intelligent traffic management are the most valuable features I have considered. There could be some that have slipped through the cracks, but these are the primary ones which our main focus goes towards.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we had occasional slowdowns and single points of failure. After putting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in place, we saw much better performance and consistency and close to zero downtime.

We have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in production as a virtual load balancer in front of core web applications for SSL offload, which eliminated downtime and improved performance.

There is always scope for improvement. Overall, it is a very strong and reliable platform. Looking at the scope for improvement, the platform is extremely powerful. However, for new engineers, it can take some time to fully understand and use all the features efficiently, especially around advanced traffic policies and customization. New engineers tend to struggle and find their way through it. The licensing and pricing model could also be simpler and more flexible, particularly in virtual and cloud environments where scaling up and down is pretty common. A flexible model could put us in a much better shape. While the interface is functional, some parts of the UI could be more modern and intuitive to make day-to-day management faster. Apart from that, I do not think there is something beyond that which needs to be changed or kept under observation to be improved.

From a documentation standpoint, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is pretty clear on that. Sometimes it can be very dense, but oftentimes it gets the job done. In terms of support, overall it is solid, but response time can vary depending on severity, licensing, and during peak times of the day. That being said, there are more refinement areas rather than major gaps. The core functionality is very strong and versatile.

I have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for close to a couple of years now.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable in my experience.

Before migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, the organization was using different solutions that caused instability issues in our current environment. After moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have seen significantly fewer outages, smoother maintenance, and noticeable performance improvements.

After migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have had fewer outages, very little downtime, and easy maintenance windows. From an availability standpoint, outages dropped very significantly after moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The combination of reliable load balancing, health checks, and failover meant applications stayed online even when individual servers had issues. Overall, as somebody who manages network and servers, I personally had very few friction instances where I had to deal with applications and software services teams. Although they are part of internal operations, I have had a much better experience after migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during maintenance and outage windows. There have been pretty significant benefits for us when we migrated from the previous solution to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been a very solid experience regarding scalability. Because it is a virtual edition, we were able to scale resources such as CPU, memory, and throughput based on our demand without major architectural changes. As application traffic increased, we could adjust capacity or deploy additional instances relatively easily. It has been a pretty good experience so far.

Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition changes from licensing based and other factors. When we have engaged support for critical issues, engineers were knowledgeable and helpful. At times it took us a pretty decent amount of time for us to get hold of an engineer. That being said, everything has its pros and cons.

Previously, we were using Citrix NetScaler, and we have had a pretty rough experience with it. That is why we explored options and changed from Citrix NetScaler to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The advice I would give to somebody else looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to invest time upfront in proper design and learning the platform before rolling it into production. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is extremely powerful, but it is not a plug-and-play tool. Understanding the platform before deploying it into production is essential.

I have personally not dealt with pricing and licensing setup for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The other team took care of it. I was solely responsible for deploying and maintaining it internally in the environment. Management took care of the pricing and licensing part.

We have seen enough uptime with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. For us, uptime is what makes us revenue. We have seen less revenue loss or, potentially, we are in a much better shape in front of our customers. That means a lot, and we have gotten enough return on investment so far.

We have done extensive research and gotten some personal opinions from industry professionals before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Some lighter or more basic platforms were easier to set up initially, but then they lacked the stability and the core functionality that we were expecting. They failed our tests. Over time, these limitations showed up as outages, performance bottlenecks, and operational risk. What stood with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that it passed all our tests with flying colors and that is ultimately why we have standardized on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We have a lot of internally hosted applications for our internal team members across the board, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has helped us with that. All of these are very big infrastructure, very big environments. We have deployed it as the primary load balancer in front of multiple application servers to distribute traffic evenly, handle SSL offloading to reduce server load, and also to monitor application health and automatically fail over unhealthy instances. Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we had occasional slowdowns and single points of failure. After putting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in place, we saw much better performance and consistency and close to zero downtime.

After migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have had fewer outages, very little downtime, and easy maintenance windows. From an availability standpoint, outages dropped very significantly after moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The combination of reliable load balancing, health checks, and failover meant applications stayed online even when individual servers had issues. Overall, as somebody who manages network and servers, I personally had very few friction instances where I had to deal with applications and software services teams. Although they are part of internal operations, I have had a much better experience after migrating to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition during maintenance and outage windows.

We did not track it down to an exact percentage, but from an operational standpoint, the difference is crystal clear with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Even to date, we still tend to notice the difference. Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were dealing with recurring service interruptions. The list is endless with recurring service interruptions, sometimes multiple incidents in a month, in a week. After moving to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, those dropped to very rare occurrences. What a new normal used to be, it changed drastically for us and outages are happening once in a blue moon. I would rate this review a seven.

Currently, we are evaluating F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  load balancer through a 30-day trial, and we are also supporting another project where our client is using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition .

Our main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that we have a DMZ zone for internal use where multiple servers or services such as HTTP or Telnet are available, and we use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for load balancing, ensuring reachability and load balancing for better services.

In the future, if any project comes along, we can suggest F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because we have multiple services such as HTTP and Telnet, along with our internal servers, which can be helpful for us. We plan to create multiple virtual IPs and create pools for customer separation to improve services.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has excellent features including easy configuration, allowing us to create separation for each client, and bridging mode for SSL client and SSL server, which is helpful for bridging and separation for the clients.

The bridging mode in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helps us and our clients because the client communicates with the SSL client, which only connects to the server's virtual IP without knowing which server provides the services, ensuring security. The internal F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancer connects to server services, functioning as an encrypt and decrypt system, ensuring separation, security features, and reachability from client to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helps us handle security and high availability in the best way since our client is using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, enhancing services with good customer feedback regarding service reachability and load balancing method and utilization, and we support this 24/7, so F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides these benefits to us.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition positively impacts our organization by improving user experience, performance, and security, which is very helpful for us.

There is nothing significantly to improve for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, but we need to configure the load balancer according to our requirements because by default, there is nothing. We can configure it according to our needs, such as nodes, pools, pool members, SSL, and services, allowing us to create profiles, templates, and iRules as needed, which are beneficial for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

For improvements, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could build in some enhanced security features, as multiple organizations, including ours, are using SD-WAN technology, and having that inbuilt with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition would provide a single point for multiple functionalities simultaneously.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is limited because we are going through the trial, so we do not know much about that yet. We will gain more knowledge and experience with it as we proceed through the evaluation.

Before trying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using proxy servers, but many companies are now switching to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because it offers a better solution than the proxy server.

We are still in the trial phase, so we have not seen a return on investment yet.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We are using the round-robin method with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which ensures a health check of the service servers and services. If any server is more utilized, another server will respond simultaneously, distributing the server services equally, and clients are happy even during interruptions, which is a beneficial feature.

I rate F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition a 10 out of 10 because it is very user-friendly, has easy configuration, ensures reachability 24/7, and provides security along with easy configuration, backup process, and ease of doing everything according to our requirements.

I suggest others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to proceed with it for its good services, and after our trial version or if needed, we will take the trial again to explore further. In the future, for any projects or requirements, we can suggest it as we gain more knowledge about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which will be helpful for recommendations.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is to facilitate site-to-user communication and to enable access to site services. In my environment, we have an internal DMZ zone, which includes an HTTP server and Telnet services. When an external remote user wants to connect with our services, we need to use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  for the round-robin method to ensure that the services have 24/7 reachability without any interruption.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers for me include many aspects of the load balancer, with iRules being one of the best features. Additionally, for SSL, we can utilize it for SSL clients or SSL users, and we can perform specific bridging, which is also a good feature.

iRules have helped me by providing a full proxy system for SSL. If we configure client-side SSL and server-side SSL, there will be separate communications, but it will function as a full proxy, which is a beneficial aspect for us.

I can smartly manage F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to build everything according to our requirements, as there is nothing set by default, but we can add things. We can perform many tasks with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, including reachability and client separation, server health monitoring, and utilizing pre-templates that apply on behalf of iRules. We can modify or change our configurations as needed, and the load balancer method can be applied dynamically and statically. There are multiple functions we can utilize with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which is very advantageous for us.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization mainly through our services' reachability for 24/7 operation without interruption, as well as load balancing, allowing us to manage our traffic for multiple servers using the same load balancer.

I hope future updates could include advanced routing and firewall concepts in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, especially since SD-WAN technology exists; integrating it could significantly enhance the services. I believe integrating SD-WAN technology would be a beneficial improvement.

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

I have noticed improvements in performance, uptime, and management since using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The round-robin method and health monitoring are beneficial, as performance is very good with the load being equally distributed to all servers. This results in fast movement, providing a service with quick access and no delays. It effectively monitors server health, ensuring if any servers go down, it promptly addresses that issue.

In my experience, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is reliable.

It can handle growth easily.

The customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been satisfactory. While getting a trial license, I communicated with the customer support team, and they responded in a timely manner. However, there was a wait time of two or three days, which could be improved.

Previously, I used an old proxy server method, and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has taken over for the proxy.

As of now, I have not seen a return on investment during my trial period.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I would advise others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that it is the best instrument for load balancing. If you desire scalability for your network and enhanced speed for accessing servers, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides a great user experience, yielding positive responses and access systems for services that will keep your customers satisfied. My experience indicates that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is doing a great job. I give this product a rating of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is mostly for application hosting, load balancing, and reverse proxy.

A specific example of how I use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  for application hosting, load balancing, or as a reverse proxy is that we had limited sets of IP addresses for the public and multiple applications—around more than 100. We didn't have 100 public IPs for each application, so using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we used only one virtual server, and behind that, we were able to take all the 100 applications. Basically, using one public IP, we are hosting all of our 100 applications, which is a lot of cost saving and also less overhead on the administration side. This was one of the use cases for which we have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I have a few other use cases for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition where there was a requirement for a persistent session to be implemented to have the proper load balancing and maintain the session with the back-end server, and we have a few applications that use this persistence feature. Apart from that, we are also using the WAF  on top of our virtual edition of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a part of the security enhancement and application security requirements.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers are all of them because we are using almost all of the features like load balancing, SSL offloading, and even the WAF , as I mentioned earlier. The most important thing is that whatever services or features we are using, it is very good in terms of performance, and it is a very stable platform for these applications without any issues. Overall, I am happy with its performance and stability across all the features that we are using.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively with cost savings, as I mentioned earlier, by saving public IP addresses, and its performance and stability, which give almost 100% uptime for the application because we have high availability. The security part is also helping us achieve that using the WAF module. Overall, the application stability and performance are all at par.

I feel that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved because overall, it is a pretty good product, but the licensing is rather costly. It would be great if the team can do something for their existing customers regarding the costing and the licensing because each module needs a separate license on top of the base LTM model, and that is one thing that I feel they should address for their customers.

While licensing is a main area for me, I think there is also a need to improve the iRule functionalities within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Currently, with iRules, the customer or administrator needs to investigate and write them, and there is no kind of base support for writing them. It would be an advantage if F5 creates a user interface or dashboard within F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, so there would be ready, available iRules, or any support could be given on the platform itself instead of searching for it on outside websites.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition since my first job, so for around 10 years, I have been working on the different platforms and virtual editions of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The uptime improvements with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are almost close to 100%, as it only goes down if a failover happens. We do the failover on the weekends during off-business hours or during upgrades when required. Mostly, only in these scenarios could we see a bit of fluctuation or a glitch for the application. Apart from that, I do not see any issues. We have not had any issues, and it rarely happens that if there is an issue, it might cause a problem for some of the applications, but apart from that, I do not see any major issues happening in my past experience with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It was pretty much stable.

I can confidently say that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

Overall, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a scalable product, and with the licensing for the additional modules, whenever we need, we can add it on top of the existing licensing without any major impact. It is pretty much scalable and advanced. We can even have multiple units in high availability based on the requirement, and based on that, we can have active-active or active-passive configurations.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has pretty good customer support, and they also have pretty good documentation available on their community platform. Support is overall good.

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, and the most important metrics are the money and time saved because, as I mentioned earlier, there was less use of public IPs for each application, as well as less application overhead for the administrator to manage from the network point of view.

My advice for others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that if you have any application or application delivery requirement where you need to host the application on the internet, and you need to fulfill different kinds of application requirements such as load balancing, persistence, security, SSL offloading, or WAF security for OWASP Top 10 signature attack mitigation, you should definitely explore F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is one of the best products that comes with a different feature set, and its performance is very good. Also, it is a pretty stable product on the platform. You should definitely explore this product for your use cases, and it is definitely going to fulfill your use cases.

Overall, I find F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition pretty good, and I always enjoy exploring it because it gives a variety of customizations that we can do as an administrator. I always look for new approaches or customizations for our use cases, and I enjoy experimenting with it. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is hosting a lot of SaaS-based applications. We host applications for multiple Fortune 500 companies, so there are many customers using the SaaS-based service. We apply application customization on every virtual server using iRules and compression. We utilize a lot of features on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition .

A specific example of how I'm using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for one of our SaaS-based applications involves a lot of customization needed for a certain application. This includes rewriting the HTTP header and recording the source IP addresses, the original source IP address of the user. We log the traffic and implement many other settings to improve the application's performance. We have implemented many things on our F5 load balancer.

I also host our DNS on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We have a lot of wide IPs configured and use it for many things including DPO or Active Directory, DNS. There are many things that we utilize F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for.

The best features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers are mainly the Local Traffic Manager and DNS and advanced WAF  feature, such as ASM. It offers us many features including L4-L7 load balancing, SSL offloading, health monitoring, persistence, traffic steering, and iRules programmability. On the DNS side, it helps us with global load balancing, DNS security, geographical-based routing, and resilience.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization as it is a very stable device. We have not experienced any kind of issues with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition most of the time. F5 support has been great. Whenever we run into any kind of issues or any assistance is needed, we can easily reach out to F5 support and they are able to help us very promptly. It created more resilient applications for our infrastructure. It was a good offering that we could build up using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancers.

I find myself relying on LTM, specifically virtual servers for hosting an application and load balancing across multiple backend servers. This is the major feature that we use. In case of high utilization of the application, or if there is huge traffic, we can add more servers and evenly distribute traffic, relying on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition performance.

I think we should have some features for getting more metrics. If we can get more metrics in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition GUI, I mean you have a BIG-IQ product, but if we can get some metrics and log metrics that show our utilization, performance, application response times in a more clear and more precise way, that would be great if that could be incorporated.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in our company for approximately five to six years.

I have rarely seen any kind of outages with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. The performance increased significantly and the response times of the application improved. We could offer a lot of customization based upon the application to our customers. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has really helped in faster response times. Using its bundled features, we could utilize it for many things including security. We do not need to worry about the security for utilizing the application firewall on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable.

Its scalability is that it can be scaled up and down easily. We just need to increase our vCPUs and we can easily increase the license-based limits or the VM cloud platform limits. We can scale it up both vertically and horizontally. It is very effective.

The customer support has been very good. Whenever we run into any kind of issues or when any assistance is needed to dig deep into the logs, the customer support has been very helpful.

F5 support was excellent whenever it was needed during issues or when we needed assistance.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition from the very beginning and have not used any other solution.

I was brought into an environment where F5 BIG-IP  was already deployed on physical infrastructure. As we progressed our journey towards the cloud, we made a move to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which was a clear choice from the very start. We never explored other options.

While I cannot discuss return on investment because I am not involved in that part of the business, I can discuss the ease of deployment and ease of operations. It is considerably easy to learn and get documentation on how to do things on the internet and F5 site. The knowledge available and free knowledge across the internet is very good. It is very easy to learn technologies if you are trying to explore more on the features. Support is very well available.

We use the best license, wherein we are using a subscription-based licensing for a one to two-year subscription, which can be scalable up and down during the entire term. In respect to the features that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers, the licensing, the cost and everything seem appropriate and at par with the competition.

My advice is that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a very stable product. We need to understand that we need to choose the appropriate licensing before sizing the VM and how we design our application and use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. It is designed to scale out and scale up. We need to select an appropriate solution based upon our requirement. We need to evaluate it properly before we go for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancers. I would rate this product a ten out of ten.