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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Score8.9 out of 10

38 Reviews and Ratings

What is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.

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Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Reviews

What users are saying about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
View all F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

Pros

  • Robust application load balancing for high availability
  • Flexible traffic manipulation via iRules for precise control
  • Efficient SSL/TLS offloading and certificate management

Cons

  • Limited comprehensive traffic analysis and graphical monitoring tools
  • Complex documentation and intricate command-line interface
  • Non-standard CLI syntax (differs from OpenSSL) requiring a steep learning curve

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Review

Incentivized
Hock Zhang Peh
Software engineer in Engineering at ola krutrim (5001-10,000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager as the load balancer for servicing huge load requests

Pros

  • Good support from F5
  • Good latency
  • Configurable
  • iRule for debugging

Cons

  • More insights of the graphical analytic of the LTM traffic to debug latency spike

Return on Investment

  • Expensive initial investment
  • Ease of deployment

Usability

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a Masterpiece for Load balancing

Incentivized
Sai Deepak Kunchey
Network Engineer in Engineering at CIGNA (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for load balancing 3000 applications

Pros

  • IRULES

Cons

  • UI
  • more accurate documentation

Return on Investment

  • Reduce cost

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Akamai

Other Software Used

Akamai

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager LTM Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Well, LTM is an application traffic load balancer. We use it both internally and externally for load balancing, external inbound applications and internal applications among different services, either within the same data center or within different data centers.

Pros

  • Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.

Cons

  • Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.

Return on Investment

  • For the most part, I mean we used it for internal purposes for load balancing, internal services, some external, it allows better uptime for one. I mean that's the primary purpose that use the load balancing form because we didn't need it for scalability, we did it for uptime just to basically have multiple redundant services that allowed our users to actually have just one point of entry on without having to do more cumbersome redundancy solution. That was the main value proposition for us.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

NetScaler

Great Product from F5.

Incentivized
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization uses F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to manage and optimize application traffic delivery within data centers, Key use cases including load balancing, security ssl/tls offloading and performance optimization enabling my organization to deliver applications reliably and security to our internal and external customers.

Pros

  • Performance optimization
  • SSL/TLS offloading
  • load balancing
  • security

Cons

  • incorporate AI to the user interface to assist IT Admin to configuring it.

Return on Investment

  • Good Return of Investment even those it is not cheap as compared to your competitors offering.

Usability

Other Software Used

Flookup for Google Sheets, LMS365

The best solution for Load balancing

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Se utiliza para balanceo de trafico de plataformas centralizadas de mision critica para la compania. Al tener una granja de servidores con El mismo aplicativo, es necesario utilizar El balanceo de trafico para las peticiones a cada uno de los servidores para distribucion de sesiones para flujos de aprovisionamiento y entrega de contenido.

It is used to balance traffic between centralized, mission-critical platforms for the company. Since a server farm hosts the same application, it is necessary to use traffic balancing for requests to each server to distribute sessions for content provisioning and delivery flows.

Pros

  • Diferentes tipo de balanceo segun la necesidad
  • Different types of balancing according to the need
  • Seguridad
  • Security
  • Maximizer El rendimiento de los aplicativos
  • Maximizer Application Performance

Cons

  • Automatizacion
  • Automation
  • Analisis de trafico en detalle
  • Detailed Traffic Analysis
  • Integracion con otras herramientas
  • Integration with other tools

Return on Investment

  • Estabilidad en los servicios de aprovisionamiento
  • Stability in provisioning services
  • Mejorar El rendimiento de la aplicacion
  • Improve application performance

Usability

Alternatives Considered

A10 Networks AX Series

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