F5 vs Open Source?
I’ve been tasked with comparing the use of open source load balancing software server solutions against commercially available off the shelf hardware. We are currently using F5 and have been happy with the products and honestly i'm not really sure why this has come about.
We use the load balancers currently for traditional load balancing, full
proxy for http/ssl traffic, ssl termination and certificate management, ssl and
http header manipulation, nat, high availability of the physical hardware and
stateful failover of the tcp sessions.
These units will be placed at the customer prem supporting our
applications and services and we’ll need to support them accordingly.
Now my “knee jerk” reaction to this is that it’s a really
bad idea. It is the heart and soul of
our data center network.
However, once I started to think about it I realized that I hadn’t had
any real experience with this solution beyond tinkering with it at home and
reading about it in years past.
Can anyone offer any operational insight and real world experiences with these solutions?