Few years ago I did this comparison. We needed an appliance and a nice web interface for non techy users.
I ended up with F5 because, at the time, there was no API in the ALOHA product. This is not the case anymore and if it was to be done again, I would go to HAProxy/LVS because you have a better control of what it is going on. There is also many small annoying bugs in F5 releases. Once you lost the DISPLAYNAME in SNMP so your logic doesn't work anymore for collecting metrics, an other time it is the sync that does not work... so loosing a device cause you to lost all connections and the other devices were not taking the failover..; F5 is a really big software suite, all integrated with a nice API and nice admin performance. The cost is another problem. The device is expensive (we were buying them near 22k€, not a public price..., for a BigIP 3900. I prefered using 6 "small" boxes to distribute the load than 2 bigger ones) but it's not batteries included ! If you activate licence for LTM (Local Traffic Manager), you can do Load Balancing, reverse proxing, etc... but if you need to enable hardware compression, you need to acquire an other licence to do this, which cost 6k€ more ! (but wait... it's in the harware that we already bought...no ? :) ) So we decided to keep the reverse proxy layer and only use F5 for Load Balancing. Reverse proxy layer was to be migrated from HTTPD to HAProxy... next step was to remove them and add failover on the haproxy layer. An other aspect that might count is the power consumption. Depending on you needs, you can set up your haproxy on really low consumption harware that makes you a green IT guy ;) On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Baptiste <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi William, > > We (at HAProxy.com) often help customers evaluate HAProxy compared to > their existing F5 configruation. > In most cases, you won't have any issues reproducing your configuration. > The most common thing in use in the F5 you can't reproduce with > HAProxy is content caching. But Varnish can be your friend for this > purpose. > > I'll write some blog articles on how to migrate f5 irules into > HAProxy's configuration. > > Baptiste > > > On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Pär Åslund <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I have experience with both. Running first F5 LTM pair for a couple of years >> before out growing them and replacing them with "cheap" (by comparison to >> new F5 units) 1U servers running Haproxy. >> >> Feel free to email me off-list and I'll answer any questions I can. >> >> .pelle >> >> >> >> >> On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:22 PM, William Lewis <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Hi >>> >>> Does anyone know of an existing comparison of features between haproxy and >>> LTM by f5 ? >>> Or have any experience of evaluating one against the other? >>> >>> Thanks >>> >>> >>> Will >> >> > -- Steven Le Roux Jabber-ID : [email protected] 0x39494CCB <[email protected]> 2FF7 226B 552E 4709 03F0 6281 72D7 A010 3949 4CCB
