Load balancing, F5, Cisco. other options

Before getting into suggestion perhaps you should explain what you to accomplish?
Type of traffic, amout of bandwidth, inbound/outbound?
Depending on what you're trying to do a lot of use Squid, ngnix/lighttpd not to mention pf (OpenBSD/FreeBSD) if you're willing to look into options apart from appliances etc.
Blue Coat might be worth looking into also I guess
//Danne
 
I've done a few Exchange 2010 load balanced CAS setups using HA configured Kemp load balancers. Pretty straight forward. What are you looking to accomplish?
 
Depends on what features you're looking for, but some of the biggest players are F5, Citrix Netscaler, and Radware. I wouldn't look at Cisco's ACE - it's been killed off in favor of partnering with Citrix, although the details are sketchy at this point.
 
We actually use Fatpipe. I think they've fallen off a bit in marketshare but their product is pretty solid. Avoid UTM though, it just isn't ready for prime time yet.
 
F5 is pretty much the top name in load balancing. My company has several sets of BigIP LTM units, doing load balancing for a fairly large ($500m/yr) ecomm company. They are VERY stable, and fairly easy to use/setup.
 
We use CoyotePoint in production, they just released a new version of their software and we like it a lot.
 
Dark Shade said:
We use CoyotePoint in production, they just released a new version of their software and we like it a lot.
Click to expand...

I've liked Coyotepoint for what we've used them for. We've had a ton in production for a good long while too
 
F5 here as well.

We had a pair of redhat load balancers that were promptly decomm'd when they took a crap and the Redhat engineer couldn't fix it. (Yes, an actual engineer from Redhat's TAC.)
 
F5.

They have some of the best free online training material ever. Also their community is top notch. If you need a irule for something, just post on their forum and you'll have a response in a couple hours.
 
I have worked with F5 mainly, and some Citrix Netscalar. I like the F5, like others have said they are one of the top ones out there. The training material that you get access to for free is VERY good. F5 explains the concepts and methods very clearly.

I had to setup a load balancer with no prior experience. We got an F5, I did the online training asked questions, made recommendations and was told no, we want it this way.

Less than a month later I changed the settings at the customer's request to what I recommended. My configs stand to this day, and that was over 2 years ago.
 
F5 is the leader in the ADC space but if you are looking for a virtualized product, check out Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager.
 
We've always used F5/BigIP at work, as well [ad-server platform type stuff]
 
Right now we have an application system that clients connect to, we can have upwards of 5k-7k connections on a busy night of TCP traffic.

We are looking into options to better optimize the traffic, we are currently on a OBSD set up with nginx as a reverse proxy and connection manager and dealing with all SSL traffic, but we want to move up to the next level as our traffic could be tripling over the next 6 months and we wish to have something with solid support versus in-house and having to scour forums and newsgroups to find answers to possible problems if something happened or relying on other teams in our parent company to help.

We aren't big on bandwidth so far, with about 5k people connected, we are only around 15-20MB of avg usage across a period, we do have peaks up to about 30MB's, this doesn't include our websites, just application side. Websites and downloads can peak if we have commercials, to which we have topped out around 160MB during downloads to which we have now moved to cloud hosting across multiple hosts to cache our downloads worldwide.

Our team and me are about to start a complete infrastructure redesign of our network from top to bottom with full virutalization from application to database to storage and also factor in co-locations and anything else i can think of that we need over the course of the next 4-5 months so looking into options for what we may want to include. We will are aiming to have real time off site replication for our databases and web servers also, so anything to cut back on possible problems will be desired.

Seems F5 is the main one, i am checking out the Riverbed and will review NetScaler,thanks for steering me away from Cisco, save me some time on research!
 
To go from relatively low performance to max, F5 will be a good migration path.
 
Sounds like F5 is where it is at then!, once we do some more tracking and such, will be seeing the kind system we want as we need to take into consideration the growth, also tossing in SSL offloading.
 
i'll add another vote towards F5 for LTM. i'd never seen one until my last job, took me about half a day to figure it out and get to the point i could reliably admin the box if any of the other engineers were out. documentation/training is top-notch...support seemed wonky at first, but once we finally got in touch with a real engineer things got explained and corrected in a very professional and timely manner.
 
That is the key for us, is the support if things go tits up! so good to hear that for sure.
 
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