What do you dislike about Load Balancer Enterprise ADC?
I really hate that both the main appliance and HA appliance both need to send health checks to the downstream servers. When you have a web application, such as Cold Fusion, that each request can take a thread on that box, any backup or long jobs can result in both the HA and master appliance failing over. This means, depending on how fast the health checks are being sent, you can eat all the threads available for an application server in no time. We found that during testing and deployment that the appliance would eat up to 6 threads of 12 total on a server (licensed by threads). While they would process quickly, a long 1.5 minute web call could cause them to fail or get backed up. Limiting the health checks to the main unit exclusively would result in less checks being backed up in the queue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Recommendations to others considering Load Balancer Enterprise ADC:
We had one minor issue shortly after implementing that was resolved with a software update. I would like the software upgrade process to be more wizard point and click oriented. In the past, I have had an issue with the serial cable used for making a cluster work. I think they can improve this part to automatically set up the cluster when a specific cable is connected on two appliances, for example. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems is Load Balancer Enterprise ADC solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost effective - we had a small number of servers that needed to be load balanced. Great support. Purchased the virtual machine model which made setup very easy. The layer 4 configuration is as good as a hardware LB if not better, the deployment on our network, the dashboards for monitoring the traffic, load, and performance is very satisfactory, management and maintenance is relatively easy and there have been hardly any support requirements sought from us, towards troubleshooting any issues. Excellent to deploy on a production environment in a virtualized platform, especially on a layer 4 configuration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.