BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

DATASHEET

What’s Inside
2 Application Intelligence

3 Programmable Infrastructure

4 Scalable Infrastructure

5 BIG‑IP Platforms Application delivery with

5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition
6 F5 Services
6 DevCentral
7 More Information
programmable infrastructure
Applications drive innovation and profitability, allowing your business to leverage trends
such as cloud computing, mobility, and software-defined networks (SDN). Your IT
department depends on your network infrastructure to meet the challenges of today—
and tomorrow.

F5® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM) helps you deliver your applications to your
users, in a reliable, secure, and optimized way. You get the extensibility and flexibility of an
intelligent services framework with the programmability you need to manage your physical,
virtual, and cloud infrastructure. With BIG-IP LTM, you have the power to simplify, automate,
and customize applications faster and more predictably.

Key benefits

Deliver applications rapidly and reliably
Ensure that your customers and users have
access to the applications they need—whenever
they need them.
Customize and automate with
programmable infrastructure
Control your applications—from connection and
traffic to configuration and management—with
F5’s unique TMOS® operating system, which
includes native protocol support, an open-
management API, and an event-driven scripting
language.
Transition to SDN and cloud networks
Realize operational consistency and comply with
business needs across physical, virtual, and
cloud environments with deployment flexibility
and scalability.
Easily deploy and manage applications
User-defined F5 iApps® Templates make it easy
to deploy, manage, and get complete visibility
into your applications.
Secure your critical applications
Protect the apps that run your business with
industry-leading SSL performance and visibility.
DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
Load Balancing 101: The
Evolution to Application
Delivery Controllers
Secure Application Delivery
2
Application Intelligence
Application Traffic Management
BIG-IP LTM includes static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure.
Application proxies give you protocol awareness to control traffic for your most important
applications. BIG-IP LTM also tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group,
ensuring that your applications are not just always on, but are easier to scale and manage.
Secure Application Delivery
BIG-IP LTM delivers industry-leading SSL performance and visibility for inbound and
outbound traffic, so you can cost-effectively protect your entire user experience by
encrypting everything from the client to the server. It also defends against potentially
crippling DDoS attacks and provides ICAP services for integration with DLP and
virus protection.
Application Delivery Optimization
BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and the user experience by making
real-time protocol and traffic-management decisions based on application and server
conditions, extensive connection management, and TCP and content offloading.
Application Visibility and Monitoring
You get more efficient troubleshooting, capacity planning, performance tuning, and
optimization by monitoring exactly how your application is performing for real users
based on application response time, network conditions, and user context. F5 Analytics
captures application-specific statistics reported at different levels of the service, such as
URL, throughput, and server latency—with views per virtual servers, pools, and nodes.
BIG-IP LTM makes it simple to integrate with your existing tools using industry standards
such as sFlow, SNMP, and syslog.
F5 Analytics provides real time application-level statistics.
DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

The Programmable Network Programmable Infrastructure

iRules

F5 iRules® is a data-plane scripting language, which enables a broad range of functionality

to be programmatically inserted into your network. Customers routinely implement security
mitigation rules, support new protocols, and fix application-related errors in real time.
With robust and flexible iRules, you can easily and rapidly develop solutions that you can
then deploy across multiple applications confidently.

iApps

BIG-IP LTM includes F5 iApps, a powerful solution that enables you to manage application
services rather than individual devices and objects. iApps gives you greater visibility into
and control over application delivery—and helps you deploy in hours rather than weeks.
This application-centric approach aligns the network with your applications and adapts
application delivery to business needs.

iApps Templates simplifies application deployments.

iControl

The F5 iControl® API and SDK help automate and integrate third-party applications and
BIG-IP LTM. iControl supports a true publish/subscribe model, which reduces network
overhead and improves the performance of applications that integrate with BIG-IP LTM
through the iControl interface. For most applications, this can reduce network bandwidth
and processing time on both the client and server sides.

iCall

iCall is a powerful scripting framework based on TMSH (TMOS Shell command-line

interface) and Tcl that helps customers maintain their environment and reduce downtime by
automating tasks. It monitors for events and executes scripts to resolve issues quickly and
predictably. iCall enables administrators to react to specified events by executing services

3
DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

on the management plane, such as generating a TCP stack dump on a failure, executing a
specific iApp to reconfigure application network service settings, or adjusting load balancing
weights on application services based on a change in health monitoring data.

Scalable Infrastructure

Cloud Ready

BIG-IP LTM makes it easy to realize operational consistency and comply with business
needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, removing the friction of transitioning
applications between traditional physical and cloud architectures.

ScaleN

ScaleN: Elastic Infrastructure F5 ScaleN™ technology uses application, operational, and on-demand scaling capabilities to
enable more efficient, elastic, and multi-tenant solutions for data centers, clouds, and hybrid
deployments. ScaleN moves beyond traditional infrastructure limitations and offers multiple
scalability and consolidation models to help you meet your specific business needs.

Virtual Networking

VXLAN and the BIG-IP The BIG-IP® SDN Services module natively supports VXLAN and offers gateway capabilities
Platform with BIG-IP LTM bridging VXLAN and traditional VLAN networks. This lets you keep things
simple, applying application delivery network services across both virtual and traditional
networks.

Advanced Routing

The BIG-IP® Advanced Routing™ module allows BIG-IP LTM to provide networking routing
capabilities such as BGP, RIP, OSPF, ISIS and BFD for enhanced interoperability within the
network, increasing the resilience and capacity of your network.

4
 5

DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

BIG‑IP Platforms
BIG-IP LTM and associated modules are available on BIG-IP hardware appliances or
VIPRION® modular chassis and blade systems designed specifically for application delivery.
F5 enables simple, on-demand scalability as your application delivery network grows. See the
BIG-IP System Hardware and VIPRION datasheets for specifications and details. For the latest
information about specific module support for each platform, see the latest release notes on
askf5.com.

10000 Series VIPRION 2400 Chassis

BIG-IP Virtual Edition

BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (VE) provides the capabilities of BIG-IP LTM with
the flexibility of a virtual platform. Supported on several leading hypervisors and in selected cloud
environments, BIG-IP LTM VE can help you meet the needs of your virtualized environment.

BIG-IP LTM VE

Microsoft Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012

Citrix XenServer 5.6 and 6.0
Hypervisors Supported: VMware vSphere Hypervisor 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0, and 5.1 and vCloud
Director 1.5
KVM—Linux Kernel 2.6.32 (RHEL 6.2/6.3, CentOS 6.2/6.3)

BIG-IP LTM VE is also available as an Amazon Machine

Image for use within Amazon Web Services.
DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

F5 Services
F5 Services offers world-class support, training, and consulting to help you get the most
from your F5 investment. Whether it’s providing fast answers to questions, training internal
teams, or handling entire implementations from design to deployment, F5 Services can
help you achieve IT agility. For more information, contact consulting@f5.com or visit
f5.com/services.

DevCentral
The F5 DevCentral™ user community of 120,000+ members is your source for the best technical
documentation, discussion forums, blogs, media, and more related to Application Delivery Networking.

Application Traffic Management Programmable Infrastructure

·· Intelligent load balancing
·· Application protocol support (TCP, HTTP, SPDY,
SSL, SIP, etc.)
·· Application health monitoring
·· Application connection state management
Application Delivery Optimization
·· Symmetric adaptive compression
·· RAM cache and compression
·· Bandwidth controller
·· TCP optimization
·· SPDY gateway
Secure Application Delivery
·· SSL/TLS encryption offload (hardware
accelerated)
·· Algorithm agility (RSA, ECC, DSA)
·· Internal HSM/Network HSM (FIPS 140-2)
·· SSL visibility (inbound/outbound)
Application Visibility and Monitoring
·· iApps Analytics
·· Performance dashboard
·· High-speed logging
·· sFlow
·· iRules for data plane programmability
·· iCall for event-based control-plane scripting
·· iApps for app-level config management and
deployment
·· iControl for Management API (SOAP)
Scalable Infrastructure
·· On-demand scaling
·· All-active application scaling
·· Operational scaling (multi-tenant and
virtualization)
·· Advanced Routing (BGP, RIP, OSPF, ISIS, BFD)
·· SDN Services license (VXLAN)
Add-on modules
·· BIG-IP® Access Policy Manager®
·· BIG-IP® Application Acceleration Manager™
·· BIG-IP® Advanced Firewall Manager™
·· BIG-IP® Application Security Manager™
·· BIG-IP® Global Traffic Manager™

6
 7

DATASHEET
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

More Information
To learn more about BIG-IP LTM, use the search function on f5.com to find these and
other resources.

Web
BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
DevCentral

Datasheets
BIG-IP System Hardware
VIPRION

White papers
Top Considerations When Choosing an ADC
Load Balancing 101: Nuts and Bolts

Case studies
Varolii: SaaS Provider Ensures High Uptime and Resiliency for Critical Customer
Apps with F5
Kettering Health Network Achieves Optimal Performance of EpicCare EMR with
F5 Solution
Pandora Scales to Serve Tens of Millions of Internet Radio Users with F5 Solution

F5 Networks, Inc. 401 Elliott Avenue West, Seattle, WA 98119 888-882-4447 www.f5.com

F5 Networks, Inc. F5 Networks F5 Networks Ltd. F5 Networks

Corporate Headquarters Asia-Pacific Europe/Middle-East/Africa Japan K.K.
info@f5.com apacinfo@f5.com emeainfo@f5.com f5j-info@f5.com

©2013 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, and the F5 logo are trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries. Other F5 trademarks are identified at f5.com.
Any other products, services, or company names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners with no endorsement or affiliation, express or implied, claimed by F5. DS-4956 0713