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.

The tool's investment is less than a physical device.

The tool has limitations with respect to code and RAM.

I have been working with the solution for four to five months.

The solution is not as stable as a physical device. It has dependencies on the physical server as well.

Technical support is expensive. They offer advanced service only when you purchase a full solution.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's deployment is complex. The deployment timeline can vary between 4 days to one week.

I rate the product a seven out of ten.