Innovations Include Increased Scale and Performance for Very Large-Scale Deployments, Improved Application Resiliency, Enhanced Kubernetes Ingress and Accelerated Migration
Load balancers are critical for any application, enabling enterprises to make their applications available, resilient and secure. VMware Avi Load Balancer continues to support the needs of Enterprise workloads for very large-scale deployments, enhanced application resiliency, container workloads support on Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes, and accelerated migration off legacy load balancers.
At VMware Explore 2024 (November 4-7 in Barcelona), Avi is excited to announce the following:
- Large-scale deployments support with increased scale by ~2X to support enterprise workloads and 3X+ to improve secure application transactions (SSL TPS) performance
- Improved application resiliency and high availability (HA) with support for multi availability zone (AZ) across both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployments
- Enhanced Kubernetes support for Gateway API, cloud-native observability and multi-cluster HA and disaster recovery (DR) through Avi integration with Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes
- Accelerated migration off legacy load balancers with Avi Load Balancer Conversion Tool (ACT) generally available to customers
- Increased Upgrade Intelligence and Reduced downtime with Upgrade Dry Run
These innovations are delivered in the upcoming Avi 31.1.1 Release and Avi Conversion Tool.
Increasing Scale and Performance for Enterprise Workloads
We previously announced the upcoming SSL performance improvements of 3X+ with Intel Quick Assist Technologies (QAT). We are excited to partner with Intel and bring the following benefits to our customers.
“Organizations are increasingly distributing intelligence generation, processing, and data storing across edge, data center and cloud which requires having a solution that can address both the compute and AI in a cost-effective way to help on both TCO and OpEx,” says Bob Ghaffari, VP Network Edge Group, at Intel Corporation. “Protecting such intellectual property starts with encryption without a performance penalty. The combination of Avi technology and ubiquitously available Intel compute resources with accelerators such as Intel QAT enables exactly that for organizations driving digital transformation incorporating AI.”
It’s a continuous journey for Avi to improve scale and performance to support some of the largest enterprises in the world. Avi increases the virtual service, web application firewall (WAF) and virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) Tenant scale significantly to support large VCF deployments with 1000s of applications. Avi also secures the applications while reducing load balancing controller footprint and improving management efficiency.
Improving Application Resiliency and HA with Multi-AZ Support
For more robust and granular failure handling, customers are implementing AZs with their custom-defined Fault Domains to ensure business continuity for the applications, at cluster/host level in a rack, across multiple racks, different halls within a Data Center, and/or across the sites.
Avi helps customers achieve the granular fault tolerance by supporting multi-AZ in VMware deployments – VCF deployments and/or VVF deployments.
- VCF deployments (with NSX): customers can take advantage of creating the AZs scoped to vCenters associated with the NSX Manager. This enables provisioning of load balancing capacity to be highly available for VCF workloads across vCenters.
- VCF or VVF deployments (with vCenter, no NSX): customers can create the AZs at the level of vCenter clusters and achieve resiliency and HA by spreading load balancer capacity across different types of hosts, clusters and applications isolated by AZs.
Enhancing Upgrade Intelligence with Dry Run Capabilities
Upgrades can present significant challenges for your enterprise, which is why we are introducing the “dry run” feature for Avi Controllers. This allows customers to test upgrades in a risk-free and isolated environment, instilling confidence for the actual upgrade.
- When the dry run feature for upgrade is enabled, customers can perform a complete system upgrade within a Docker container on one of the follower controller nodes.
- This process allows customers to conduct thorough pre-checks and fully test the configuration with the new version with no impact to active controllers.
- Once the upgrade is finished, the container will be terminated, and a detailed system report summarizing the results is provided.
To take advantage of this feature, Avi Controller must be upgraded to version 31.1.1 and operate on a 3-node cluster. Future upgrades and patches will include the option to perform a dry run, ensuring a worry free upgrade experience.
Enabling Gateway API, Analytics and Multi-Site Load Balancing for Tanzu Kubernetes Workloads
We announced the gateway API support for Kubernetes and now we are pleased to extend Avi integration with the Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes. Tanzu platform provides a common control plane and data model as a centralized hub and dashboard for any cloud, platform, tool or persona with contextual app visibility. Avi integration with the Tanzu platform leverages:
- Next gen ingress Gateway API (see the blog for details)
- HTTProute resources to provide first class observability and analytics to applications exposed externally
- Tight integration with Avi GSLB for multi-cluster, multi-site support enables developers to deploy applications across application spaces enabling full HA and DR use cases.
With a fully integrated solution, Tanzu customers achieve faster issue resolution, rapid application troubleshooting and in-built automation while achieving DR with active-active options. See the documentation for more details.
Simplifying and Accelerating Migration off Legacy Load Balancers with ACT
We announced the Avi Conversion Tool as initial availability and now it is generally available to customers. Having engaged with 10s of customers migrating their legacy hardware load balancers to Avi, converting more than 700 custom rules and thousands of virtual servers. Avi Conversion Tool helped customers cut their migration efforts by ~70% through an automated and simplified approach to convert custom rules and configurations into streamlined Avi Objects, Policies and Datascripts. Designed for large-scale operations such as financial institutions managing many critical applications, this tool enables customers to bring back agility by rapidly migrating off of their legacy hardware load balancers (see the demo).
We look forward to sharing more details on the next set of Avi innovations at VMware Explore in Barcelona (Nov 4 – 7, 2024). Add the following sessions to your schedule.
- [ANSP1237BCN] Ransomware Prevention and Cloud-Speed Application Delivery: Innovations in vDefend and Avi
- [ANSB1173BCN] Deutsche Telekom Scales European Soccer Championship on Avi Load Balancer: Start of a Journey onto VCF
- [ANSB1180BCN] VCF Load Balancing with Self-Service for DevOps at the Speed of Apps
- [ANSB1179BCN] Secure VCF Kubernetes Workloads with Avi Ingress and Gateway API
Learn more from the two blogs on Avi innovations to accelerate application deployment and Plug-and-play load balancing for VCF. Find out how Avi helps with F5 refresh and deploying VCF.
