F5 Agility

Started by AnthonyC, July 25, 2015, 04:52:44 PM

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AnthonyC

July 25, 2015, 04:52:44 PM
Anyone going to the F5 Agility in August?  I went last year and had a blast, full lab day is going to be awesome. :)
"It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system."

deanwebb

#1
July 25, 2015, 05:31:04 PM
My conference was RSA... what's F5 Agility like?
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

wintermute000

#2
July 26, 2015, 05:11:53 AM Last Edit: July 26, 2015, 05:21:56 AM by wintermute000
genuine question: why is F5 so dominant? What makes it so much better than ACE, A10 or Netscaler?
side question: what was so bad about ACE that made it die in the behind and Cisco to withdraw from the market completely?
I must admit, load balancing / application networking is one of my blind spots so wanting to learn a bit more (without getting sucked in LOL)

deanwebb

#3
July 26, 2015, 09:19:56 AM
From a 17 Sep 2012 article... http://www.crn.com/news/networking/240007425/cisco-ceasing-development-of-load-balancer-products.htm

Quote
The chief executive of a major West Coast solution provider with a significant ADN practice said he isn't surprised at Cisco's move or that its competitors are pouncing.

"That piece has been fading for Cisco for years -- there are way sexier manufacturers in that space with better products," said the solution provider, who requested anonymity. "We do sell Cisco [ACE] but it's mainly enterprises that love Cisco and want all of it Cisco. F5 ate Cisco's lunch in that part of the business a while ago."

:professorcat:

Then, an analysis of Cisco's failure with ACE and a question if they'd ever get good at the layer 4-7 stuff: https://nerdtwilight.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/cisco-puts-ace-in-the-hole/

Basically, doing it all through acquisitions may not be the right way to go.  :think:

And then a Cisco guy posted the comment:

"Brad, you have some factual inaccuracies in your blog. Cisco is not exiting the ACE product line and will continue to support and deliver new features for our existing ACE and GSS customers. No imminent EOS/EOL notices are planned as a result of this announcement."

:vendors:

Comments are a good read on that one.  :drama:
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

wintermute000

#4
July 26, 2015, 04:40:39 PM
Good history lesson but more after a technical evaluation from someone who knows both platforms

deanwebb

#5
July 26, 2015, 07:03:21 PM
Quote from: wintermute000 on July 26, 2015, 04:40:39 PM
Good history lesson but more after a technical evaluation from someone who knows both platforms

Well, this thread looked like it had some comments from guys that had tested both: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/833657-111827207

Big plus for F5 was its advanced features relative to what Cisco offered.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1737421 mentions free F5 training. That's a nice thing to have.
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

LynK

#6
July 27, 2015, 08:58:53 AM
Quote from: wintermute000 on July 26, 2015, 04:40:39 PM
Good history lesson but more after a technical evaluation from someone who knows both platforms

Winter I cannot in detail explain the differences between the two since all of my loadbalancing expertise is with barracuda/F5, but let me explain to you why I see it as phenominal.

We own two viprion high end chassis, for full resiliency. This device acts as a full proxy (in, and out). So it allows for much more scalability, and granularity within your network. The viprion chassis also has firewall modules to act as a behind the scenes firewall in your DMZ environment as well as a content filtering modules and many more features.

I was able to use route domains on our viprion chasis to segment my load-balancing on my network so our F5 can load-balance internal infrastructure as well as external infrastructure. iApps are a fully customizable suite of step-by-step (and many microsoft/etc. recommended) configurations. The F5 has hands down the best UI i have ever worked with. Besides the fact of its intelligent balancing (do not have time to get into this... but essentially because it is a full proxy you cant intellengently LB to your boxes with extreme granularity).

Granted we did not need the virprions. They are power horses and ISP level load-balancers... but my previous manager demanded that we needed them. In all honesty... I love the devices.

These F5's can now maintain SSL streams... what this means is... if I am load-balancing exchange with client users... I can sit there and hit the failover button as many times as I want and there is 0.... 0!!!! downtime...  :professorcat:
Sys Admin: "You have a stuck route"
            Me: "You have an incorrect Default Gateway"

AnthonyC

#7
July 27, 2015, 11:43:19 AM
Quote from: wintermute000 on July 26, 2015, 05:11:53 AM
genuine question: why is F5 so dominant? What makes it so much better than ACE, A10 or Netscaler?
side question: what was so bad about ACE that made it die in the behind and Cisco to withdraw from the market completely?
I must admit, load balancing / application networking is one of my blind spots so wanting to learn a bit more (without getting sucked in LOL)

My exposure to other load balancing platform is rather limited as I only used NetScaler a little bit in my last job, never touched A10.  What I do like about F5 is that their CLI has the option to drop you basically right into their own version of linux with direct exposure to standard linux tools (and also their own shell which they call TMOS, which is their IOS equivalent).

F5 also have fairly decent documentation and support forum (devcentral is pretty awesome), their GUI is quite decent and fast (unlike say vSphere Web Client ...).  Also the few times that I had to call their support staffs, they have been awesome compared to any other vendors that I have to deal with in the past.

Lastly load balancing by itself is fairly commoditized so the value add for most LB vendors is to pitch a platform that do more, be it security/proxying/SDN.  On that front, F5 is doing a pretty good job.
"It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system."
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