At 08:15 09.02.2008, Paul Raj Khangure wrote: >I was wondering if anyone had any F5 experience and could give a rough >overview of comparitive advantages / disadvantages, or point me in a >general direction of where to concentrate on evaluation. >
basic differences that I would see would be mostly on how you plan on using it. If you're only switching on L4, Foundry offers a fast, cheap solution. If you're interested in any sort of advanced application switching, F5 is pretty nice. The cli is robust and coupled with linux under the hood allows for all the fun you can muster. It has a nice configuration synchronization (mebbe it's just me, but I've never been able to get that working on the SI stuff) and features that make it easy to manage. The things that you need to be aware of with F5 is how different types of profiles alter the level of hardware accelleration that the platform provides. i.e. if you're just doing L4 switching, it can be completely done in hardware; full-proxy L7 rule-based switching and you are dealing with cpu-limitations. My experience showed that something like the 6400 platform which is sold as a 2g throughput box drops down to about 600mbps when fully l7 switched. ymmv based on the complexity of your rules. And yeah, R. Oliver's point about it having a pretty gui is true (it's actually pretty nice, compared the the SI-brokenness of it's gui). License model isn't really bad. Depends on what you want to do with your box. I always just used the basic license without issue. Seems complicated because you can just do more with the F5 than the SI platforms. If you don't want/need ospf, advanced caching, lots of ssl, or gslb, just don't buy the licenses. --Peter
