My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is that I used it for LTM, ASM, and GTM modules. I used F5 LTM to load balance customer application traffic, and I used ASM to protect and safeguard customer applications from various cyber threats, attacks, and day-to-day emerging vulnerabilities. We also had DNS and Global Traffic Manager services for multiple client applications, so I have hands-on experience with all these technologies of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition including LTM, GTM, and ASM.

In my previous organization, we had a data center virtualized environment using VMware ESXi hosts. We had bare metal ESXi hosts where we installed VMware vSphere and NSX virtualization software. To perform customer application load balancing and enable application security, we installed F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition VMs, which can protect the application from various cyber attacks and perform seamless application load balancing for traffic sharing between application nodes. We purchased licenses for VMs based on the requirement of LTM, GTM, and various security features and deployed the VMs on VMware vSphere and the VMware NSX environment. I also had work experience deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in public clouds such as GCP and OCI from the marketplace images, enabling seamless network connectivity and performance for customer applications via F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition VMs.

With the specific use case of load balancing and protecting against various threats, I use F5 LTM to perform load balancing for major production applications. One of our customers had only a single application server serving all application traffic of the entire production application and reported a performance issue. Following the management architecture review of the application, they identified the need for enabling load sharing for the application. We suggested implementing F5 LTM load balancer, which could provide load sharing between multiple application nodes. We recommended hosting the application on multiple servers instead of a single server, configured it via F5 LTM, and ultimately load balanced the application traffic for three additional nodes. The client achieved seamless traffic load balancing between the multiple application nodes, and the application performance increased, eliminating the slowness issue. In terms of LTM features, we can offload SSL certificates on LTM, conduct SSL encryption and decryption, and implement numerous traffic redirection rules, multiple LTM policies, and iRules that affect application traffic. Regarding ASM, we have used it to protect client applications from DDoS attacks, major OWASP Top 10 attacks, SQL injection attacks, script injection attacks, and many botnet attacks. For instance, one of our clients experienced a DDoS attack on a major live application, and we enabled ASM policies with DDoS protection, setting TPS count values based on geolocation IPs. Using those DDoS protection policies, we prevented many DDoS attacks. The WAF ASM signature has helped us mitigate various cyber threats for clients, utilizing automated policy learning and traffic learning to avoid manual intervention in creating and hardening security rules.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition includes strong application delivery and load balancing without needing to purchase separate devices for LTM, ASM, and GTM, as all modules are available on a single device. The solution is reliable for hosting applications and performing load balancing and acts as a reverse proxy, providing unified public access for multiple applications. Additionally, the cost advantages compared to physical appliances are notable since pricing for physical appliances is significantly higher than for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Therefore, for enterprise clients, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is much more cost-effective and provides cost savings.

Moreover, F5 LTM has many reliable security features, including DDoS capabilities, DDoS protection, bot protection, IP reputation, and threat intelligence. These are key features available in F5 ASM to protect customer applications. F5 LTM, GTM, and F5 products enhance customer application experiences and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition supports deployment across various platforms in public clouds including AWS, Azure, VMware, KVM, and other hypervisors. These are major positive features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

Since we implemented F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have experienced better application performance and lower costs compared to hardware appliances, along with flexibility in deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition across multiple hybrid clouds. The solution provides a stronger security posture, operational efficiency, and automation facilitating deployment in automated modes. It integrates with various orchestration tools and SIEM tools, offering centralized management via BIG-IQ, and reduces server load and application load by cutting down on SSL encryption, decryption, and security analyses performed by different security tools and servers. This has led to a reduction in server count by up to 60 percent for improved application performance and SSL offloading.

The improvement points I can suggest are that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition tends to be highly resource-intensive, as we often encounter issues with high CPU, RAM, and storage utilization, particularly with ASM and LTM modules. Moreover, the licensing and pricing can be complex, and the pricing seems higher compared to other products. Certain virtual editions come with NIC limitations, permitting only two NICs for some VMs, and there are performance concerns when compared to hardware appliances, especially with high loads running on multiple modules simultaneously. Additionally, the device's GUI is not user-friendly, requiring admins to undergo significant training to begin administering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, as it appears outdated. I would suggest considering pricing reductions, improving performance and resource consumption, and making the GUI more user-friendly.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for nearly six years.

Apart from issues with high CPU and memory utilization and resource consumption, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scalability is satisfactory as we can add necessary CPU and memory resources when needed, purchase new licenses, and add required features to scale the devices deployed on F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

We receive prompt customer support from the technical assistance center. However, we have experienced delays in support during non-business hours on weekends. For business hours and critical cases, prompt support is consistently provided.

Previously, we utilized VMware NSX cloud-native AVI load balancers and Array load balancers, but both of those had limited features compared to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition load balancer and ASM. The existing solutions did not meet our feature requirements or customer demands, which is why we switched to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

In terms of return on investment, we have seen significant improvement in application performance after deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. This enhancement has led to better user experiences and attracted more business or application traffic, contributing to organizational growth.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been generally good, although it is managed by an account manager. While I encountered scenarios where the pricing was higher compared to other products, the overall experience was satisfactory, with proper support from the account and sales team during the procurement of new VMs.

We evaluated VMware AVI load balancer, WAF, and FortiWeb WAF before choosing F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I would advise others looking into using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition to consider it based on their application architecture. If an application requires better performance, security postures, and reliable delivery, I would recommend using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. I am satisfied with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and have no further additional thoughts on it. I would rate this product a 6 out of 10.

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.