[salmo]

I dunno about rock solid. I’ve had plenty of issues forcing a failover/reboot, multiple complicated tickets open a year, etc. But we have a sh ton of them. To be fair, some are kernel bugs with connection table leaks, SNAT + UDP, etc.

Buuuut, they have by far the best support. They’re as responsive as Cisco, but every product isn’t a completely different thing, team, etc. And they work really well in a big company used to having Network Engineering as a silo. I’d only use them as physical hardware, though. As a virtual appliance, they’re too resource hungry.

Nginx or HA-Proxy are technically great for anything reasonable and when fronting a small set of applications. I prefer nginx because the config is easier to read for someone coming in behind me. But they take a modern IT structure to support because “Developers” don’t get them and “Network Engineers” don’t have a CLI.

For VMWare, NSX-V HA-Proxy and NSX-T nginx config are like someone read the HOWTO and never got into production ready deployments. They’re poorly tuned and failure recovery is sloooow. AVI looked so promising, but development slowed down and seemed to lose direction post acquisition. And that was before Broadcom. Sigh.

[kevin_nisbet]

I'm very out of date so take my opinion with a grain of salt. The customer support I received from F5 when they acquired a telco product was about the worst support I've ever seen. Now this wasn't the general LB equipment that F5 has the reputation around, it's some specific equipment for LTE networks.

We'd get completely bogus explanations for bugs, escalate up the chain to VPs and leadership because there was an obvious training, understanding, and support for complex issues problem, and get the VPs trying to gaslight us into believing their explanations were valid. We're talking things like on our IPv4 only network, the reason we're having issues is due to bugs in the equipment receiving IPv6 packets.

So it's one of those things where I've personally been burned so hard by F5 that I'd probably to an unreasonable level look for other vendors. The only thing is, this was awhile ago, and the rumor's I've heard are that no one involved is still employed by F5.

[salmo]

I completely get this. I feel like every product I’ve had outside of a vendor’s wheelhouse has gone that way. We just use the BigIP gear from F5 and they’re better than the load balancers we used in the past. Thank god Cisco just abandoned that business.

I can’t imagine them supporting telco gear. The IPv6 thing has me LOLing because I just had a similar experience with a vendor where we don’t route IPv6 in that segment and even if we did, it shouldn’t break. Similarly, a vendor in a space they don’t belong that I imagine we bought because of a golf game.

A thing I dread is a product we’ve adopted being acquired… and worse, being acquired by someone extending their brand into a new area. It’s also why we often choose a big brand over a superior product. It’s not the issue of today, but when they get bought and by who. I hate that so much and not my decision, but it’s a reality.

It’s also a terrible sign if you’re dealing with a real bug and you’re stuck with a sales engineer and can’t get a product engineer directly involved.

I have a list of “thou shalt not” companies as well, and some may be similar where a few bad experiences ruined the brand for me. Some we’re still stuck with and I maaaay be looking for ways to kill that.

[Bagged2347]

> I have a list of “thou shalt not” companies

Can you share that list?

[salmo]

First, I don’t make these decisions but sometimes have influence. These opinions are my own and not my intentionally unnamed employer, and might be flat out wrong. This list is very focused on big companies at stupid scale with a lot of legacy… applied tech.

Generally my rule is “except for their very core product.” But this is full “hate everything” that pops into my mind:

RedHat won’t accept gifted patches for critical bugs in their tools that they won’t troubleshoot themselves. Getting the patch upstream means you get to use it in the next major version years later. That predates IBM. I won’t use their distribution specific tooling anymore. Outside the OS sucks worse. If I hear ActiveMQ one more time… [caveat: I probably hate every commercial Linux distro and Windows because my nonexistent beard is grayer than my age]

IBM… kind of feel sad about it, but they now suck at everything.

Oracle has good support, but they’re predatory and require an army of humans to manage inherently hodgepodge systems. Also creates an organizational unit of certified admins that can’t transition to alternatives because they’ve only memorized the product. Cisco’s the same except the predatory part and without many good alternatives for core DC gear.

CA, Symantec were awful pre-Broadcom and even worse now that they’re Broadcom’s annuity. Where products go to die.

Trellix (ex McAffee) is like the new Symantec or something.

There’s more I wish I could list for you, but can’t for various reasons.

On the other end, Satya has made MS a reasonable choice in so many things. Still a lot that sucks or is immature, but still… I didn’t think that was possible. I had to shift my mindset.

[karolist]

When was this? I worked with them 2009-2018, support was really top notch. We could get super technical guys on the call and even custom patches for our issues, but our usage was relatively simple. I contrast them with McAfee products we've used, now that was a complete shitshow as a product and support.