One last point when comparing software or appliances: support cost, response time and quality ;)
This ML, despite being about an OpenSource product is quite responsive and a very good quality. Furthermore, Willy and the dev team dislike bugs, even in the dev version..; So usually, fixes are quickly released. And for those who need more professional support, with contracts, SLAs, etc..., then haproxy.com is there, with many different type of products around HAProxy :) Baptiste On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Steven Le Roux <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
