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

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.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  at the State of Oregon involved migrating from Cisco ACS to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , specifically using their LTM module. Day to day, I handled a lot of services, including load balancing and certificate management. I onboarded customers looking to balance loads between servers using their LTM module, and I also worked extensively with the AFM module, which is a firewall, and the APM  module, which is their VPN.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is especially useful for its load balancing capabilities. They excel in round-robin load balancing methods and offer persistence methods that can be beneficial for hosting websites where customers navigate multiple times to fill out forms. For instance, in an application hosted on a server, I could implement a persistence method to maintain session continuity, combined with round-robin methods that optimize performance on the application side.

I also utilized F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for their APM  module, which provides a solid VPN solution. They have a user-friendly flow where, for example, I could add a one-time password easily. The remote access VPN capabilities are notable, and I appreciate their AFM module for firewall functionalities. The GUI is very user-friendly, allowing me to create rules and NAT policies with ease.

The best features F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers, in my experience, include their flow method and APM module. I have used Palo Alto and Cisco products, but I find F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's APM module exceptional for its visual representation of authentication processes. Additionally, I appreciate how clearly F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition handles certificate management, all accessible from one dashboard for easy renewal or creation.

The flow method in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition stands out for its GUI, as I can visually compare different customers without digging into details the way I would have to do in Cisco or Palo Alto. For example, if I want to see differences between customers, in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I can visualize it all in a flow diagram while seeing the features associated with each customer, which simplifies the comparison process significantly.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization at the State of Oregon by streamlining operations. The load balancing module, in particular, was very effective, as it simplified the user experience compared to Cisco's extensive tab system, which made it hard to correlate user authentication. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's customer-centric approach allows me to see individual client configurations without confusion.

I have noticed specific positive outcomes with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, such as significant time savings and a reduction in errors. I have a clearer overview of which features each customer has, which minimizes mistakes during operations and enhances our overall efficiency.

In terms of improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, I encountered issues with load management when multiple modules such as AFM, APM, LTM, and GTM are handled together. If one customer has all modules in use, I found that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition struggles with load capacity, leading to problems, particularly with high traffic volumes.

The primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations. While their iRules and LTM modules perform well, handling large traffic volumes remains a challenge, necessitating improvements in their load handling capabilities.

I am not currently using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in my role, but I used to work for the State of Oregon, and I migrated to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, which is how I know about this product, having worked on it for approximately five years.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has proven to be stable, although it faced challenges handling high traffic volumes. At times, we experienced difficulties that required close monitoring, especially with traffic loads, but the load balancing module still performed admirably.

The scalability of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was quite impressive, as it allowed us to onboard many customers efficiently. I particularly appreciated the APM and LTM modules, which facilitated an easier onboarding process for additional customers. However, the primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations.

Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been excellent. We received quality assistance for our inquiries, and I appreciated their forums, which provided comprehensive answers to many questions and architectural queries.

Before adopting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using Cisco solutions. We transitioned to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition after reviewing budgetary concerns and architectural advantages, prompting our move to incorporate load balancing, VPN, and AFM modules into our infrastructure.

We have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. By using multiple integrated modules such as AFM, APM, and LTM in one platform, we avoided the need for separate components, which saved considerable money and space.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has been very favorable, especially compared to competitors, as F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's pricing structure was significantly more advantageous and aligned with our budgetary considerations.

In our evaluation process, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition really stood out among competitors. Although we considered other options, we ultimately decided to pursue F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. For firewall solutions, however, we also looked at Palo Alto for potential improvements.

My advice for others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is to focus on the LTM and APM modules. As for the AFM module, I would recommend checking if there have been significant improvements over the last five years since I last worked with it. I believe I have provided all the insights and feedback regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition that I can. I have rated this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  is that we are in the process of publishing services, observing the traffic of the published services publicly, and any backend servers. We assign the virtual IPs and then check the traffic and bypass the traffic which is blocked according to the requirements of the customer.

A specific example of how I have used F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a recent troubleshooting scenario where we had to whitelist one of the API calls that was passing through the WAF  of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We went onto the physical servers, checked the log traffic, added the text file, and whitelisted the text file and applied the configuration. This is how the traffic was exempted from passing through the WAF.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers extensive documentation available for any help required and the capability for multiple licenses within a single platform.

The documentation has helped me significantly by allowing me to avoid having to install new hardware or separate appliances for WAF, BIG-IP, load balancers, and different ADCs, as I can manage everything in one big box and purchase the licenses. The ease of use of the documentation makes it straightforward for many users here, so it is easy to find use cases on the internet.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has positively impacted my organization by providing separate candidates for managing F5 traffic, leading to more effective publishing of services publicly, assigning public IP addresses, and then assigning the virtual IPs, nodes, pools, pool members, and all of that. It definitely provides a granular approach to the device.

I truly appreciate the power of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition compared to any other vendor we have used, and we have seen more use cases coming in, proving it to be better than other products.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could be improved by enhancing the GUI, as I think it should be more user-friendly.

Aside from the GUI improvements, I find that with other products, everything appears more organized. For instance, with FortiWeb, we have a dashboard where I can check the policy status with just one click, and everything is easily accessible. In F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, it tends to require navigating through menus and sub-menus.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  in different roles, specifically in banking, where I used BIG-IP LTM  in one infrastructure. Currently, I am working in an environment where we are using the ASM module as a WAF .

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is very stable.

When my organization needs to handle more traffic or add more applications, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scales up easily without running into any issues, and it is very smooth.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides very good customer support. I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a perfect ten based on all of the experience I have had so far.

Before F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we were using a different solution, specifically FortiADC  for Application Delivery Controller and FortiWeb for ASM.

It was relatively easy to deploy F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition initially due to my team receiving support from F5. We were there for them, and it was pretty much taken care of by the F5 support team.

I would describe the learning curve for my team adopting F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as definitely present. We learned a lot from it, especially from the provided documentation and many use cases available over the internet.

Integration with other solutions or platforms in my environment through F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has not posed any challenges. It is pretty straightforward with the appliances that we currently have.

I have seen a return on investment with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as compared to other appliances we have used. With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have not faced any RMAs, which has made a positive operational impact.

My advice to others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition would emphasize its scalability, the power of the appliance, and its reliability, which are big pluses for the product.

I have a positive response on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. However, I strongly feel that the GUI needs to be a bit more user-friendly, as I find FortiWeb's GUI more accessible, even though the product is not as powerful as F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. My overall rating for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is eight out of ten.