VMware Avi Load Balancer Introduces New Innovations to Further Accelerate Application Deployments

Avi Load Balancer is the industry’s first software-defined load balancer (LB) for hybrid clouds that delivers a distributed architecture with built-in automation and deep application visibility. Avi’s pioneering innovations have enabled IT teams to deliver load balancing at the speed of applications while ensuring elasticity (scale-out and scale-up) and a consistent operating model across hybrid multi-cloud environments, including VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), traditional data centers as well as native public clouds for virtualized, Kubernetes and bare metal workloads. Our recent vision blog also highlights this unified load balancing approach with a “single SKU” Avi offering for all features and capabilities.

Avi Load Balancer is redefining the innovations bar across the following dimensions:

1. VCF Private Cloud Applications: Avi is the load balancer of choice due to its plug-and-play operating model for VCF, delivering the following unique advantages.

• Rapid LB deployment due to built-in integrations with vSphere and NSX
• Automated LB workflow with Aria Operations, formerly vRealize Operations (vROPs)
• LB self-service through integration with Aria Automation, formerly vRealize Automation (vRA) – new
• Application visibility extended to VCF admins to rapidly troubleshoot application related issues before involving the load balancing team

2.  Kubernetes Applications: As an ingress LB, Avi’s software defined and elastic architecture is ideally suited for the distributed and dynamic nature of container workloads. Avi’s advantages include:

• Built-in automation with Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO)
• Gateway API is a next gen Kubernetes ingress, significantly reducing the need for customizations via annotations and custom resource definitions (CRDs), and also future proofs customers for Kubernetes and serverless workloads – new 
• Built-in ingress security – including Web Application Firewall (WAF) – to protect container workloads. No additional feature license required

3. Mobile and 5G Applications: Avi delivers a flexible and consistent load balancing solution for a broad set of telecom and mobile use cases. 

• Natively multi-tenant, now delivering ~3X higher multi-tenancy with VCF and Telco Cloud Platforms (TCP) – new
• Full support for recently shipping TCP 4.0 – new
• Further enhancements to industry’s first software-defined IPv6 load balancer (with decoupled IPv6 control and distributed data planes) for on-prem and cloud – new

4. Legacy LB to Avi Conversion Tool – new: To simplify and speed-up Avi deployments in brownfield environments, we are announcing the Avi Conversion Tool. The tool:

• discovers legacy LBs
• extract configurations
• converts legacy LB configurations and custom rules (e.g. iRules) to Avi
• deploys configurations on Avi

This tool will accelerate legacy-to-Avi migrations delivered by our professional services team. More>>