F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition - GOOD (PAYG, 200Mbps)
F5, Inc. | 16.1.5.1-0.13.7Linux/Unix, CentOS 7.3 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
External reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Poor Traffic Management & Security
What do you like best about the product?
It lacks the versatility and capabilities of Big IP Virtual Edition. It requires some effort to set up and a learning curve, with the IT personnel or support, from F5 the implementation process becomes hectic.
What do you dislike about the product?
The limited range of modules provided does not cater to needs and as web traffic increases Big IP becomes difficult to adapt. It comes at a cost, it is a cumbersome software in the market.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Managing the softwares Marketplace service is burdensome. There are some concerns regarding server to server communication limitations and heavy reliance on LBs that potentially impact efficiency through cascading flows.
- Leave a Comment |
- Mark review as helpful
F5 BIG IP Review
What do you like best about the product?
The UI of the F5 is the best and its modules,it has many many modules under it, like caching, and access control. firewall and security manager, compare to the Netscaler this is little expensive
What do you dislike about the product?
As said earlier it is expensive and ease of ding installing is not that great when compare to Citrix Netscalar. The prices can be mich better and in market F5 is the widely used software
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
F5 is more of application routing tool, where it helps in routing the incoming traffic in a round-robin mechanism, and helps to diversify the load of the traffic to multiple servers effectively.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Already its a market hero in number 1
F5 has a lot of potential
What do you like best about the product?
When running smoothly, F5 is awesome. I’m able to access all of the files needed for my business, which is a must have. Makes me feel like I’m in the office sometimes even though I work remotely.
What do you dislike about the product?
F5 has a lot to offer but it could use some improvements. Although it has improved a lot, the constant disconnection hurts as I work remotely and rely on it. I have determined through multiple sources that it is not my ISP but, in fact, F5.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Definitely great because as soon as we login, we have access to all of the applications we need to do our job. Also great to have as a remote user. Without it, I cannot do my job.
The integration and configuration into the AWS environment was pretty good. However, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs.
We use it for low balancing.
It has been in our environment for four to five years, but I have only been using it for a little over a year.
What is most valuable?
* The detail that you have available when setting up iRules.
* How the traffic routing works in F5.
What needs improvement?
The management process seems a bit difficult.
The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface.
For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs. However, this is more an implementation detail than an F5 detail.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. I have no concerns regarding stability for F5.
We are seasonal, so we go from low to high volumes. F5 has never been a concern of ours for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We run an Active-Active version of two instances, so scalability between the on-premise and AWS versions hasn't been a huge issue for us. Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot.
How is customer service and technical support?
We have support agreements in place, but they are managed by the infrastructure team. I do not contact the technical support, they do.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration into the AWS environment was pretty good.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The product was already in place when I came onboard.
My preference is to use AWS natively, but there are some issues around session management and so on, which have prevented us from using it. While a lot of these issues have been solved, a lot of our applications are tied to the F5 infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
Always use the Automatic Synching between F5. Don't try to use the API to do the synching. This is where we went wrong. We were trying to push the nodes to F5 individually instead of letting F5 handle the synchronization process, and it doesn't work.
showing 1 - 4