LoadMaster Load Balancer

Great load balancers for the cost. Watch out for potential sudden steep price changes, though.

Commenti: Great load balancers for our Microsoft Exchange mail systems at an affordable cost.

Aspetti positivi:

Very flexible and affordable load balancers. They work great, with very little hands-on maintenance required to keep them running smooth.

Aspetti negativi:

Kemp unexpectedly raised the prices on their maintenance plans, and they now cost double what they did a few years ago. This was quite a shock to us since we had not received any sort of warning that their maintenance prices were going to be increased, and they had no flexibility on this price change. We had already budgeted for the maintenance renewal based on a budgetary quote they gave us a few months before the price change, and as a result we had to go severely over budget in order to keep our equipment covered.

Reasonably pricey, but customer support is excellent

Commenti: Our high load solutions are very scalable; enabling HTTP/2 was literally checking a single checkbox.

Aspetti positivi:

The KEMP load balancers just work. For our purpose where we have about 25.000 concurrent users working on various web applications, it's a simple and easy solution that makes the entire application much more scalable.

Aspetti negativi:

The KEMP has a built in feature to do caching. I would like to be able to specify exactly which file types I want to specify; KEMP has it the other way around where you can specify certain things NOT to cache. Also, the way to temporarily disable real servers is a bit weird; you can disable a real server, but the system will keep sending existing users to that server, yet it won't show in the statistics how much traffic is going to the server.

Loadmaster - An economical investment

Commenti: This is an affordable alternative to F5 and some of the more expensive load balancers on the market.

Aspetti positivi:

Kemp's pricing makes this product much more affordable than other options on the markete.

Aspetti negativi:

Lack of some advanced features other competitors have

Great Product for all SLB needs

Commenti: Great support from pre-sales to Post sales to pro services. Everyone I've interacted with knows their core competencies extremely well.

Aspetti positivi:

Easy to deploy in all situations. Varying license types to accommodate most users.

Aspetti negativi:

It's not terribly intuitive when you come from another competing Vendor.

Best value and support that I have seen in a long time!

Commenti: Took only a few hours to set up and now it just runs and we forget about it!

Aspetti positivi:

The virtual load balancer was inexpensive and very easy to install and create/use but the technical support is excellent! I emailed a setup question in for the free trial load balancer and received a answer within an hour! I was then asked to do a remote session so they could check what I had done so far and also offered the help finish the setup! I elected to finish on my own to learn the software and the support tech would email me asking for updates and if I needed any additional help all the way through the trial and licensing of the complete software! This level of support has not been seen in years, please keep it up!

Aspetti negativi:

So far have not been able to find a single con.

Good product, needs to be setup properly and will work as expected

Commenti: We improved outlook performance and stability for the end users, during daily business but also reduce service interruptions during maintenance windows. The load master is built as a virtual appliance and we set it up in a cluster, so that it is fully redundant. We are looking into using it also to balance other applications, which Kemp can do as well.

Aspetti positivi:

KEMP have a partnership with Microsoft in order to load balance Exchange which was a great plus for us while selecting the right product since we wanted mainly to loadbalance Exchange for the Outlook client in order to minimize interruptions during maintenance windows or simply to balance connections. The great thing is also that the virtual appliance allows you to load balance your application but without the need of adding hardware to your datacenter. this is a great approach and the technology has proven to work as expected without issues.

Aspetti negativi:

There is a well written administration guide which needs to read extensively before setting up services. This is not a product where complexity is taking away from the administrator. Lots of options, sometimes a matter of try and retry before all works. UI could be improved.

Great product

Aspetti positivi:

The LoadMaster is easy to setup, it is almost impossible to make a mistake. And when we have questions we usually get a response within a couple of hours. Very good support.

Aspetti negativi:

They need to work a bit more on the user interface when you have many SSL certificates. The list is unclear, and that bit of the GUI just doesn't work too well. I understand most use cases have only one or two certificates, we have over 30 per virtual host. But they should be able to work on that.

Load balancer with great features

Commenti: Ever since it run in our production, LoadMaster virtual load balancer is serving us really good and without any hustle. The product is stable, easy to setup and maintain, and is doing it’s job amazingly well.

Aspetti positivi:

Virtual load balancer with great set of features, supports many protocols, stable, intuitive, not too complicated to setup and maintain, competitive price

Aspetti negativi:

Haven’t had any trouble since first day, there are no disadvantages that I am aware of

Some experiences

Commenti: We replaced the SLB servers of Cisco hardware with LoadMaster.
This product is better because check not only layer-4, but layer-7.

Aspetti positivi:

I can setup it very easily, but it knows very complicated check too. I'm very satisfied the Support Team, they always helped very quickly and helpfully.

Aspetti negativi:

I can't tell any bad for it, but I have been using it since the end of last year. Till that time we setup simple virtual services.

Had the VLM200 up and running production work in about 30 minutes.

Commenti: Easy to use and affordable loadbalancer with ongoing development and support.

Aspetti positivi:

Very easy to use. Configuration options follow a logical flow. Monitoring options provide useful information.

Aspetti negativi:

Would be nice to have options to sort or search the information on the statistics menu. Was difficult to come up with something I could say is an issue...

Great load balancer

Commenti: I started using the LoadMaster to replace a Microsoft WAP solution that was publishing Exchange OWA and Lync to the Internet clients. Soon it was replacing other load balancer solutions we were using internally. We also have a lot of network devices using static IP configuration and when we changed our domain controllers, we had to re-configure them all manually, one by one. With LoadMaster, the solution was as simple as creating new virtual DNS services pointing to the new DCs.

Aspetti positivi:

The software is quite easy to setup and configure, thanks to the large number of available templates to download. For more complex situations, Kemp Support Team is there and they're really fast and good at what they do. The free version runs almost all the features of the product and it can be used permanently in a test environment or even in production if there is no need for a large bandwidth. It's also possible to have several interfaces in different networks, so one box can be used in different network segments, keeping the traffic isolated. Working with the LoadMaster is pretty much set it and forget it: once configured, it just runs with no problems.

Aspetti negativi:

It doesn't run well in Hyper-V or at least it didn't when I bought it last year. I really don't like the way logs are presented in the software. A lot of the information in the logs is only meaningful to Kemp Support Team.

LoadMaster

Commenti: My overall experience has been excellent, our company has been able to move away from Microsoft NLB pretty seamlessly and the support engineers have worked with us to help implement our solution which is less than basic. A functional yet affordable product and also great staff.

Aspetti positivi:

The LoadMaster is easy to implement in a resilient virtual environment. The documentation knowledge base online is very helpful even for advanced deployments. But overall I am most impressed with the level of support, I am always speaking to a knowledgeable engineer who knows how to resolve any issues I encounter. And even if they don't they will continue working with me until we reach a solution together.

Aspetti negativi:

The web UI can be slightly clunky, sometimes you have to manually refresh and even reboot the device specifically when using HA. But if you stick to Chrome the experience it's generally a lot better than other browsers.

KEMP is an excellent partner for a first time implementer of a load balancer

Commenti: 2019 was the first time setting up and administrating a load balance for a SharePoint farm. Kemp's professional services, training and assistance made the setup easy. We even had to troubleshoot a connectivity error early in the setup due to us having purchased the wrong type cable and Kemp kept involved until it was correct to our and there standard. License support for 2020 was easy and straight forward which is a pleasant surprise compared to some other companies I have worked with.

Aspetti positivi:

Ease of use of the software and instructions provided are excellent. Kemp's professional service is recommended to download and setup your first template. Also the re license for 2020 was made easy with simple instructions sent out by license renewal team.

Aspetti negativi:

The graphs of analytic data for your load balance data could have more options. It would be nice to be able to add more data types in the graphs and expand the time range.

The easiest to use load balancer on the market for the price

Aspetti positivi:

The load balancer took me 15 minutes to set and another 15 minutes to have my first application running through it. No other load balancer has been this easy to setup.

Aspetti negativi:

the kemp load balancer required features for HA that we currently could not meet. We will be implementing updates to our systems to support load balancer HA

Great Product For A Virtual Environment

Aspetti positivi:

We started using Kemp Load Balancers in our VMWare environment. Initially for a specific use cae, we have now expanded to use them for load balancing for all systems requiring load Balancing. The things that stand out are: - Ease of Deployment - Ease of Upgrade - Quality and responsiveness of the technical support team - Ease of license maintenance - Continual improvement of the product With addition of cloud services, we will use Kemp there too as this will maintain a consistent experience across platforms.

Aspetti negativi:

No 'Save Changes' button. It's too easy to make a change and click 'back' without the intention of actually saving the change. This means that if an admin was reviewing a setup and inadvertently changed a setting, when they click back, the change is implemented even though that may not have been their intention. Providing a 'save' prompt would prevent this.

LoadMaster VLM - Fantastic Virtual Web Load Balancer

Commenti: We are using it to load balance one of our mission critical apps.

Aspetti positivi:

The ease of use and setup. It's a virtual appliance that you import into VMWare and it installs and works quickly and easily. The setup is simple and once you have it running, it just works.

Aspetti negativi:

The support Web site they have set up for downloading updates is a little janky, and finding and updating the software for the VLM isn't the easiest. Plus the virtual appliance Web management interface doesn't have a log out option.

Excellent product and value for money

Aspetti positivi:

The user interface is very straight forward and does not need any special knowledge to configure. Also it is very flexible and there are a lot of customization you can do to address most of our needs. In addition the support is immediate and to the point so I consider KEMP as very reliable. I have been using KEMP from 2012 and had no issues whatsoever and all services were 99.99999% up.

Aspetti negativi:

Transparency to the connection is a bit complex to achieve.

Kemp Loadmaster

Commenti: We are using it for Microsoft Exchange, Citrix, RDP and Rule Engines. With it we are realising High Availability and it works perfect!
It is easier to use and more costefficient then Citrix NetScaler.

Aspetti positivi:

Price/Cost Value is very good It is reliable. We had almost no Trouble with the boxes over years and no complete failture of a box. Enough power for all businesses.

Aspetti negativi:

It is not easy to configure. You have to book a Course to learn it. Kemp Schoolings in Germany very rare. Got one over 500km from my Office.

Product works well and is mostly reliable

Commenti: We are able to load balance websites and services at enterprise level and we are able to replace our Microsoft Threat Management Gateway with these appliances.

Aspetti positivi:

Has web interface and menus are easy to understand, installation is easy enough and products are easily identifiable in the racks.

Aspetti negativi:

The upgrade process can be very disruptive and hard to interpret multiple email alerts where it would indicate services are down, but when we check the services are up.

Load Balancer Used For On-Prem Email

Commenti: We use the LoadMaster to manage the On-Prem Exchange Email System. We use redundant servers on a DAG. The LoadMaster allows a hands-off switchover upon failure for on-site clients, OWA and Cell phones
This has helped us put stability back into our email system

Aspetti positivi:

The LoadMaster is easy to use and setup.

Aspetti negativi:

Have not found any deficiencies with the loadmaster

Easy to use

Aspetti positivi:

The LoadMaster software does a great job of exposing the features that you're most likely to use/need. It comes with a bunch of pre-configured templates for the most common use-cases, which can speed your time-to-deployment.

Aspetti negativi:

The LoadMaster admin GUI isn't the prettiest of interfaces, but as this is mostly a set-and-forget piece of software, that's not a significant drawback.

Have always had good luck with both Kemp VLMs and KEMP Physical Load Balancers

Commenti: Easy of use, used with exchange server farm to provide continuous service even if a server needs to be taken down for maintenance.

Aspetti positivi:

Easy to set up , secure, and very affordable. With the Kemp templates., workloads can be deployed in very short amounts of time.

Aspetti negativi:

I can't think of any major cons for the Kemp. The only catch would be it would be nice to have integrating with LDAP for Admin users on the box.

Loadbalancing made Easy

Commenti: Great, it have always work to my satisfaction in many environments

Aspetti positivi:

The endless possibilities to get it to work in any environment with any service.

Aspetti negativi:

Sometimes its just hard to figure out the right configuration for the job, but its there that Kemp Excellent support team always deliver with quick support by email or a remote session to get at request sorted quickly

Simple and effective

Commenti: Easy load balancding for HTTP/HTTPS servers

Aspetti positivi:

Simple configuration!!!! With very little experience with the device it is still easy to get it up and running

Aspetti negativi:

HA fell out of sync and was a bear it get operational again. Had to break the devices out of HA clear the config on another and then bring the HA back up from scratch. Not a deal breaker but was anoying

ITManager

Commenti: We have been working with the product for several years and very satisfied with it.
Efficient and easy, very fast When you switch between mail servers and you do not feel downtime

Aspetti positivi:

Work perfectly with ms lync server, exchange and AD

Aspetti negativi:

Maybe in the future we can block access to the product by a global location like a specific country and not just by an ip address that updates once a day.