From: Chris Kirby (ckirbyIZZATsolaristech.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 12:02:38 EDT
We have a pair of clustered F5 BIGIP load balancers and we are extremely
happy with them. However, they are "outdated" running 4.2 code and we've
been told we have to pay a significant amount of money to upgrade. Costs
were almost $20,000 for software only which includes re-certification. I
understand why F5 tack on such a large fee but we're a small company and
unfortunately cannot afford this.
We have an interested buyer in our equipment (he knows that he can't get
support or software upgrades from F5) and we are considering selling. We
find ourselves extremely satisfied with BIG-IP performance and features;
however we don't want to be in a position where we cannot patch security
vulnerabilities without F5 code upgrade. We would love to be able to buy
software-only upgrades from F5 but they have told us that we have to buy
hardware and telephone support as well and it's not possible to just buy
software updates only at a reduced cost.
If we sell them, we would need to replace them with something else. I've
been looking at Linux LVS and wanted to ask around for people's opinions
with using it. Other than SSL acceleration (we don't need it), are there
other drawbacks to LVS that I should be aware of?
Our traffic averages about 4mbps and we don't have any complex rules. We
pretty much only use session persistence, server health checks, and load
balancing (ratio and fastest node). We however like the detailed network
statistics that the F5's provide (network stats per IP and per port) and
would like to find out if LVS has this as well?
If anyone would like to offer some time and compare the pros and cons of
using LVS and BigIP, that would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
Chris.
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