Review your F5 Experience

F5 Networks
#1

Your Knowledge is Wanted!
If you have experience working with F5 devices, your expertise is wanted. Many people are going through migration evaluations and would find it very helpful to hear your honest review of F5 load balancers. Contribute your thoughts below.

Questions to Consider:

What do you like about F5 devices?
What do you dislike?
What recommendations would you give others considering the product?
What business problems are you solving with the product?
What benefits have you realized?

#2

I love everything about F5. I have 10+ years experience all most of its products
I have about 30 customers in my country. I have deployed more than 150 F5 devices in the country.

#3

What do you like about the F5 devices?
the versatility and performance of the equipment.
• What do you dislike?
handling
• What recommendations would you give others considering the product?
that the solution is very good, configuring it well.
• What business problems do you solve with the product?
SSL VPN, application balancing
• What benefits have you noticed?
the support and good hardware features

#4

What do you like about F5 devices? -> Irules
What do you dislike? -> Bugs :frowning:
What recommendations would you give others considering the product? -> Stability
What business problems are you solving with the product? -> Load Balancing, Security
What benefits have you realized? -> Stable Network, Secure Network, Faster Network

#5

What do you like about F5 devices? ---- Range
What do you dislike? ---- less innovation
What recommendations would you give others considering the product? ----strong tmos
What business problems are you solving with the product? ---- banking security
What benefits have you realized? ----- irules flexibility

#6

What do you like about F5 devices? ---- stability
What do you dislike? ---- less CLI features
What recommendations would you give others considering the product? ----strong and proven Load Balancer
What business problems are you solving with the product? ---- Application security and load balancing
What benefits have you realized? ----- flexibility

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#7

What do you like about F5 devices? ---- Reliability
What do you dislike? ---- less CLI features, not cheap
What recommendations would you give others considering the product? ----strong and proven Load Balancer
What business problems are you solving with the product? ---- Application security and load balancing
What benefits have you realized? good hardware features

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#8

Best function in F5 is the speed at which it allows you to move from a traditional datacenter design to a cloud focused roll out.

With F5 VE in any of the three public cloud deployments, you take advantage of same LTM, ASM, and APM functions, all managed right through BigIQ.

Why learn each of three simple load balancers? Just bring in yours from your existing datacenter.

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#9

Hi Indeni Community,
My 2 cents here (from a former F5er)

What do you like about F5 devices?
GUI is good, CLI was lacking but got much better with tmsh on version 10. Compared to other vendors (Citrix, Radware, etc) the product is much more flexible thanks to builtin features, irules and devcentral community.

What do you dislike?
Bugs and it seems F5 is loosing relevance on the DevOps and cloud front. F5 Networks buying NGINX says it all.

What recommendations would you give others considering the product?
For customers doing just basic load balancing (LTM), without the need for irules and fancy stuff, the price may be too high. LTM modules by itself is facing strong competition from nginx, AWS ELB, etc. If you plan to use just LTM, there may be other cheaper options (nginx, haproxy, aws elb, etc), if you need LTM + GTM or LTM + ASM, then the price may be justified.

What business problems are you solving with the product?
Load Balancing with LTM, GLSB with GTM and WAF with ASM. Worked mainly with UK (FTSE 100) and European customers. Customers do like F5 products, except when they hit a nasty bug.

What benefits have you realized?
My biggest achievement related to F5 is the migration of 150+ BIG-IP appliances into vCMP and VIPRION chassis using Network Automation (iControl). vCMP + VIPRION can greatly help to reduce BIG-IP devices footprint consolidating several expensive F5 devices into fewer vCMP instances

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#10

Welcome to the community! Feel free to visit our Knowledge modules on F5 here
https://community.indeni.com/c/knowledge?match_all_tags=true&tags=f5

I think you’ll be able to provide good insight there too @npucheta!

#11

Thanks Jessia, I will do. Cheers

1 Like