F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition - BETTER (PAYG, 25Mbps)

My main use cases for using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  are mainly WAF . That's the main purpose.

We use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition  mostly for the login functionality with our Salesforce  and for security login purposes.

The features I appreciate the most about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are the WAF  capabilities.

The advanced web application firewall protection and SSL offloading capabilities of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition have been utilized in my organization. These features are contributing to our application security and compliance posture.

I find it too complex to assess the impact of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's automated deployment and integration with container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes  and OpenShift, on my applications delivery speed and reliability.

I don't use F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's automated deployment and integration with container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes  and OpenShift.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for about five to six years, possibly longer.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable and reliable. I have not experienced any stability or reliability issues with the solution.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition scales with us as we are continuously expanding the deals of the product.

The solution is performing well and keeping up with our needs as we continue to increase our usage.

I do not use customer service and technical support directly with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We have an integrator called Spider. They are satisfactory and whenever they encounter issues, they open a case with F5 and assist us.

I would rate the customer success and technical support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition an eight out of ten.

I have no idea about the ROI from using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. We use the technology on the technical side, not on the financial aspects.

I don't have information about the pricing, setup costs, or licensing for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I do not use the load balancing and traffic management features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I use other container orchestration platforms, but they are not relevant to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I have utilized F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's ability to integrate with cloud platforms including AWS , Azure , GCP, and Salesforce .

I have no idea how this integration has helped my organization manage hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

The seamless integration of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition with existing F5 technologies is not important to me as I do not use other technologies from F5.

Financially, we require F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition because we need the product. We don't have anything else that performs the same functions, so we use it without trying alternatives.

I just use and manage F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, though I didn't handle its deployment.

I would recommend F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition as a solution to others.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition an eight out of ten overall.

In my company, we use NGINX . I don't work with NGINX . For us, it is better to have the virtual solution because we have more virtual VJPs on fewer machines. This is the reason we are using it today.

It's easy to use, and they have good support. When we open tickets, they are answered quickly, and they help us solve any issues. When our environment starts to grow, it is better to have the virtual solution because we have more virtual VJPs on fewer machines.

It's expensive and could be cheaper. At the moment, I can't think of anything to improve.

It's very stable. We use a cluster in our environment. We use the cluster more when we need to update some of our machines to ensure no downtime. It is very stable.

The scalability is satisfactory based on our needs.

They have good support. When we open tickets, they are answered quickly, and they help us solve any issues.

Neutral

One day is enough to set up. Today, we deploy a machine by ourselves. When we started to implement the environment, we had support from F5. Today, for example, if it's necessary to deploy a new machine, I can do this by myself.

It's like FortiWeb. It's expensive and could be cheaper.

The solution is very good. I would rate the solution maybe ten out of ten. 

I use the solution in my company to meet the virtualization needs of our customers. In the case of a payment gateway, according to the application, every VirtualBox gets segregated. Every VirtualBox will have multiple banks connected to one particular vCMP for a specific application.

The solution's most valuable feature is its good virtualization concepts. My company is very happy with all the basic features of the product.

On-the-go upgrades are an option that the tool currently lacks, making it an area where improvements are required. If you have an instance where you have a specific configuration of CPU memory when you want to increase it, you have to parallelly create a new instance, and you have to export and import the configurations. On the go, if you could give any option to shut down VirtualBox, increase CPUs, and start it again, that would be a good option.

I have been using F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for more than four to five years.

It is a scalable solution.

In F5 BIG-IP i5800, if you have assigned a single CPU and memory for a virtual instance and if it increases, you can just add a CPU and memory to the existing vCMP. What you have to do is spin one more virtual instance with the two CPUs and double the memory, like eight GB memory, for example. You can't just increase the existing VirtualBox. You have to create another VirtualBox parallel, download the configurations, and import it.

My company provides one banking application to around ten customers. My company has around seven virtual instances and seven applications, each application having around 70 customers running on one F5 BIG-IP i5800. My company has created seven VirtualBox.

The solution's technical support was good. Whenever my company reached out to the product's support team, we got solutions to our issue. In case an issue doesn't get solved, then it gets escalated, and the product's support team provides our company with an engineer to deal with the problem.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model and the cloud model. For the on-premises version, my company deployed it on something like F5 BIG-IP i5800, and for the cloud deployment, we have installed the virtualizations on Cisco CSP kind of tools. My company ensures that VirtualBox is deployed on CSP. In both the aforementioned scenarios, we have tested the tool, after which we started to use the product in the past two to three years.

My company's customers need to make payments for the licensing charges attached to the product. It is an expensive product. As per the requirements of our company's customers, we opt for it if it is the only hosting option available. My company also needs to see which box from F5 matches the requirements of our customers.

Speaking about the impact of the tool on the application delivery process, I can say that static routes are limited. For every vCMP, there are some limitations of VLAN IDs and static routes, like the number of routes that can be added. There are some limitations in the product that are likely to impact our company's applications.

In terms of performance and scalability features, according to the application limit, my company can add a single CPU per vCMP or two CPUs per vCMP, which is dependent on the load requirements that we plan. The company also needs to plan according to the application requirements. My company didn't face any issues following the aforementioned process.

My company provisions vCMPs based on the concurrent session support and SSL support criteria. Based on the data sheets, my company checks the total concurrent connections, SSL connections, and throughput limit. Even when my company plans to do segregations, we plan to do them according to the specifications described in the data sheets.

You need ten pieces of the tool for load balancing. If my company's customers' requirements only consist of a product that offers five features, then they can adopt a basic OEM tool. If some customers need more features in a product, my company recommends F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition. Mostly our company's customers do accept our suggestions and choose F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it since it is a user-friendly and not-so-complex tool.

The integration capabilities of the product are easy to use, and there is no complexity involved in it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use it in the IT environment in Brazil for a financial bank in Latin America. 

We're primarily using BIG-IP LTM  across our data centers, employing it for global load balancing with GTM. This setup is crucial for our operations in Mexican, Colombia, and Brazil as well.

The biggest impact is in security solutions, for example, with HCM, which is recognized in the Gartner. We use BIG-IP for cloud security and branch management in the cloud.

Moreover, the integration with other networks or security solutions improves the infrastructure.

In Brazil, within the government environment, we use BIG-IP for load balancing and another solution as a proxy, which is called Blue Coat. 

We utilize BIG-IP, for example, for load balancing. The VPN model we use is called ARC. The first solution connecting with BIG-IP is very effective.

The features that I like include LTM and Global Traffic Manager (GTM).

BIG-IP could improve in supporting microservices, for example, in Docker  and Kubernetes  environments. 

Accessing and load balancing with Docker  and Kubernetes  is becoming more common in financial banks to scale services globally.

I have been using it for many years. 

The stability is 50-50 because the environment has a lot of connections, which influences stability. For example, the VM in the environment sometimes becomes unstable, particularly the connection. In such cases, we need to decrease the connections within the environment.

Scalability is easier to manage because it's possible to scale up big clusters, both in cloud-based and enterprise environments. So, it caters well to new business segments.

There are 8,000 end users in the company.

My impression of the support team is mixed; sometimes good, sometimes bad. For example, when I raised a ticket for an IMEI issue and needed to replace BIG-IP, it failed. No problem, this process is very easy for replacing the software. So, I had a complex problem in my environment. The standard package was not satisfactory.

Neutral

I used a different solution, but its performance was very bad in comparison to F5 BIG-IP .

The initial setup is 50% complex and 50% easy because I had to follow a lot of steps. It wasn't that simple. 

In our environment, it is 90% in AWS . I use BIG-IP in the cloud, where the cloud fronts are AWS , Columbia, and Brazil, creating the infrastructure.

The pricing is standard. 

The pricing is moderate,  not too expensive, and not too cheap. For a small company, it might be considered very expensive.

I would recommend using this solution. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution for web application firewalls and VPNs. It could be your VPN concentrator, intelligent DNS, and load balancing.

For public clouds like AWS in Azure, the solution can use AutoDiscovery to discover the members of the virtual machines in AWS and Azure based on their tagging mechanism. This way, when you add a new virtual machine, it will automatically be added to the Virtual Edition's post.

It has a web application firewall (WAF) module. It has to get web application security. It has DoS layer 7 protection, which not many vendors have. The solution also automatically builds the thresholds for DoS attacks so that you don't have to configure the DoS manually. You enable it with basic settings, and it's using machine learning to learn the baseline and detect DoS attacks.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is a heavy system that needs a lot of CPU, memory, and hard disk. Also, the solution's center management is not very well managed.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The solution has been much more stable over the last few years because it's an old product, and its bugs were fixed.

The technical support is good for a complex product like F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition.

The solution's initial setup is easy because most bugs are fixed.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is an expensive solution, but it's worth the price.

We have deployed the solution on VMware, private cloud, and public cloud. F5 is going to release a new product, BIG-IP Next, which will be a new implementation of BIG-IP with many more features. BIG-IP Next is going to be more cloud-friendly because it's going to be based on containers.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has a scripting module. If something is not in the default functionality, you could always make a script that will solve your issue. Even if it's something that would take a week, you'll still be able to write a script to solve your custom use case. Most vendors don't have such scripting functionality.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is worth it, but it's a complex solution that has many functions. Users may have to do some learning instead of using it straight away. The learning material is publicly available to learn, but it will take time.

The solution's integration is straightforward because it integrates well with others like Splunk. The solution's security functionality is one of the best for the on-premises device. Nowadays, the solution has integration with shared security.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.