VMWare Avi Load Balancer Reviews

Avi Load Balancer is the next-generation load balancer, which VMware provides.

Earlier, we used a traditional type of load balancer. Due to the limitation of this traditional load balancer, we deployed this next-generation load balancer. This has very advanced capabilities like a web application firewall and very high-level visibility of an application's traffic flow. 

It works as a load balancer, so the application availability for day-to-day operations has bee really useful. It's helped the organization to enable the high availability of applications and also the monitoring and security of applications.

The WAF - the web application firewall itself - is great. The API and application debugging features, where we can see the tie of any requests, have been great. 

The solution is stable. 

It scales easily.

The product itself is very reliable, and robust, and offers an all-in-one product.

I'm not sure if there is a particular area that needs improvement. 

The initial setup is a bit complex. 

I just used it for a very little amount of time for one of our projects, which was just handed over to our clients. I've used it for around 3.5 months.

It is a stable solution. It is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We find the solution to be easily scalable. 

We have around 1,000 or more users.

It's unclear if the client has plans to increase usage. 

We previously used a Citrix Load Balancer and Aria Networks Load Balancer. 

The implementation is a little bit complex. It is not a traditional load balancer. You require some application-level and networking-level knowledge for the deployment of this application. It is a very new deployment type as there is one controller and there are service engines in there. 

You only need one person to handle the deployment and maintenance. 

We deployed the solution ourselves. 

We have seen an ROI. Moving from a legacy solution to a newer one has provided us with tangible returns. 

I'm not sure of the exact licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options before deciding on Avi.

I'd advise potential new users to exploit the next-generation capability in Load Balancer. Everyone should consider this next-generation solution for the deployment and high availability of applications.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Typically, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is used for application delivery, some security use cases, and some Kubernetes service mesh. The primary use cases of the solution are application delivery and resiliency.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer can improve the way some organizations function because the platform is agile. You don't have to forward invest in a lot of hardware or large bandwidth-based licensing. It can essentially scale horizontally in and out as the application demand is there, so it's very efficient to align with the needs of the application at any given time. Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is very easy to deploy and very flexible in the way that the feature sets can be deployed in a lot of different use cases, so it covers a lot of security and application use cases that give it a lot of flexibility and applicability to different environments.

What's most valuable in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its deployment capability, the ability to deploy in a dispersed service, with the service engines that can disperse and have a single control plane that can control the load balancing services across any available platform, wherever needed. The analytics of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and flexibility of deployment are its most valuable features and the reasons why many people buy it.

One struggle with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its integration with other VMware products. Integration could be improved in the solution so that you have a more unified control plane with it and other data center security and networking products that VMware sells. There has been a bit of a lag on the roadmap of new features that have come out there recently, but better interoperability with the hyperscale environments such as the AWS, Azure, GCPs of the world, and simpler deployment and interoperability with those existing tools, are areas that are receiving attention and could use additional attention today. These are the areas for improvement in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer.

What I'd like to see in the next release of the product is further extension into service-managed capabilities, particularly for Kubernetes environments. That's going to be a big player.

Some pretty cutting-edge API security capabilities are being built into Avi Networks Software Load Balancer that are covering big tag vectors that people will continue to see when scaling out microservices applications. Those are also going to be big players moving forward and differentiators for the platform.

I've been selling Avi Networks Software Load Balancer for approximately two and a half years, and I've been selling up to the current 22 version, though I'm not sure what the latest release is.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is a stable solution. Its stability is not only based on its well-written code, but also on the disaggregated way it's deployed. If there's a particular problem with a service engine, for example, the time it takes to recover and keep applications up is extremely fast. It has a pretty healthy analytics platform that goes with it, so it's always measuring application health and its own health, so the remediation of issues as they come, reduces the blast zone, and is fast to recover so you're not seeing large portions of downtime.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is extremely scalable. It's essentially because of the architecture of the application, of the control plane, and data plane segregation between the two, so it's essentially infinitely scalable, though there are obviously engineering requirements.

I would rate technical support for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer four out of five. It's a very "direct services" organization that doesn't delineate between the engineering and development and the solutions and services teams. It's all one big team that doesn't have a lot of layers or pillars within so support isn't slowed down. Technical support is very efficient and it's a very close-knit team.

The initial setup for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is very straightforward. I have customers with certain environments, even complex environments, where the solution can be deployed within two hours, from start to finish.

I've seen a return on investment from Avi Networks Software Load Balancer. With the business evaluations my company did, you're not forward investing in massive amounts of hardware or high bandwidth licensing. The return on investment is extremely quick because of the alignment to your licensing and what applications you have and require at any point in time. The challenge with engineering around a lot of platforms these days is that you have to make a guess and deploy and hope that you're consuming the amount of bandwidth and hardware that you've deployed, and sometimes, it's extremely underutilized and over-engineered, and so you're spending money on things that you're not using.

The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model.

On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive.

Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing.

I didn't evaluate other solutions as I'm in sales.

I'm in sales and I sell Avi Networks Software Load Balancer to enterprise customers in the North America area. I have enough familiarity with the product.

I have customers that have deployed Avi Networks Software Load Balancer in all of the various models: on-premises, hybrid, and all the various permutations of that.

In terms of user roles for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer, the typical user roles are networking and security teams, though some customers are more progressive and rely on development organizations to manage balancing capability. More of the legacy environments would have a networking security team that would operate the platform as you get into more of the hyperscale and the dev-ops organizations that are a little bit more progressive. The development teams make that part of the CICD pipeline and operate the platform in an agile way.

As for how much staff is required for the deployment and maintenance of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer, it varies. There's no prescribed number of operators per workload, and the intent is because it was developed as a cloud-first type of platform, it's very automated in low touch as far as operational requirements and overhead, versus some of the competition I've seen out there.
Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is on the very efficient side of low operator requirements for deployment versus what you may have typically seen, for example, a hundred applications per administrator ratio. It just depends on how the organization operates and how the operations teams are organized and divided.

My company has a lot of customers that are operating F5 and NetScaler, and many of the other competitor platforms, and I don't see customers making large new investments in more staff to bring in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as part of the solution mix, so it's a solution customers can bring in and not overburden existing teams with.

The advice I would give others looking into implementing the solution is
to not look at Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as a brand new load balancer that is complex and hard to deploy, but look at it more as a cloud-first architecture that provides both automation to ease operations, and analytics that provides real-time feedback on platform health and how it's able to auto remediate any problems that it might have. It's not a new, scary skill set that some operations team is now burdened with, rather, it's more of a very efficient tool that makes jobs easier.

I'd give Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a rating of eight out of ten. I don't know if there's any platform out there that can get a ten, but this solution is on the very high end.

Our primary use case for this solution is for application delivery controls, and the solution is deployed on cloud.

The friendly user interface is valuable and has powerful technology and background.

The product could be improved in terms of security features. For example, IDS and IPS sites need to be more progressive.

We have been using the solution for two years.

The product is stable.

The product is scalable.

We have not interacted with customer service and support.

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate it ten out of ten.

The implementation was in-house, and implementation time varies depending on the project's scope.

I cannot comment on pricing as a different department handles it.

I rate this product ten out of ten. The solution is entirely virtual. SDDC technologies drive it, and the integration with other projects is compelling. Additionally, it has been used in a VMware tonsil product. It is a good solution, but the security features can be improved.

As an application load balancer, Avi Networks is great. Its visibility and login mechanism are the best parts. 

In addition to the great visibility it has

• a great dashboard
• an easy to configure graphic user interface, a beautiful GUI. 

All these features are great.

I really liked Avi Networks, but we are looking for more secure stuff. After downloading the report from IT Central Station, I spoke to the account manager of Avi Networks in the Middle East, and he said that they are selling the module we need as a separate product. I didn't want it because I don't want to have product upon product for each and every functionality.

I work for a major municipality and the whole our infrastructure runs on F5. We have close to eight F5s, the bigger boxes. F5 has a product called APM and that is not in the box with Avi Networks; you need to buy another product. I wish they included everything in one box because that's how we buy a product, especially an application load balancer. 

Everybody has to compete with the market leader and F5 is the market leader. But F5 is very expensive and that's why everybody wants to go to the cheaper load balancers. But to do that the competition has to include all the functionalities of F5. Avi Networks is great. It could be good for a small company, but for the whole municipality, it's just not good enough.

Avi Networks could put all the modules of F5, which are available in their hardware box, inside the software. They shouldn't sell the products separately. I would say 90 percent of the people in the Middle won't buy it. I know the government sector, and they wouldn't buy it.

For example, if you have a washing and the dryer comes separately, you're not going to buy it. The washing machine is great. It does great washing, but you have to buy another apparatus for drying. That just wouldn't work. With Avi Networks you have to accommodate the extra product in the data center. Of course, they say that they are all virtual, all software-based, but there is still a lot of software integrations and connectivity that are required.

Avi Networks is something I really wanted to go with and try because our F5 is a million-dollar-plus contract. Two of our F5s are going out of support, end-of-life. I really thought we could change it but for now, we cannot. If Avi Networks could bundle everything as one...

I did a PoC of Avi Networks. We put it in a virtual appliance on a trial for close to a month.

The product is not stable the way we would like it to be. Let me explain. 

I bombarded the box with traffic, like a stress test, taking it to the max from a couple of my servers, generating all sort of malicious traffic to see how that box would end up coping. What we figured out is that it can handle up to 60 percent, but with heavy traffic and with all this malicious stuff, things started to slow down. It may not be the product's fault. It could also be because of the server I ran it on. Maybe a powerful server could have made it better. But I still think that Avi Networks would be better for small to medium businesses.

For a huge infrastructure like ours, with all the security modules running on software, I'm not so sure. They said that Avi Networks runs New York Stock Exchange, but I am really wondering about that.

I did not contact tech support.

But I did ask people who are running Avi Networks, even in Citrix, "How many support tickets do you create in a year?" What I learned is that Avi Networks and Citrix end up with about 150 support tickets a year. Some people said 70 to 75. Those are the kinds of stats I got. With F5, I only raised four tickets last year, that's it. And we run the whole show in our city. We have 700 services up and running 24/7 on F5 and we only had four support tickets. 

The initial setup was easy. I was able to deploy by myself. It took a couple of hours. I set it up in a couple of hours because I needed to set up the server and then I needed to run different things to enable the firewall rules, etc. But its setup is pretty easy.

I'm still going to have a meeting with Avi Networks, due to the cost factor. I also want to test their add-on product and see how easily we can actually integrate it and see if it is worth it, because the price factor is great with Avi Networks.

If you're buying a bigger F5 it costs around $1 million dollars, and you can only use it for one data center. With Avi Networks, you can buy a 10-Gig license and, if your primary data center goes down, in the flick of a switch you can move that license to your backup data center and it will generate the traffic. So you don't have to have a box for this data center and another box in a different data center. So there are a lot of cost-effective measures.

Go for it, but do it in chunks. The best way to implement Avi Networks is not to do it like F5. With Avi Networks, you need to understand the product and you need to conceptualize your network exactly like Avi Networks conceptualizes it. You cannot do it in the way that traditional data centers are set up. For example, F5 as a box, holds 700 virtual servers, supporting 700 applications. You cannot do that on Avi Networks. So when I say to do it in chunks, that means you need to set up three or four Avi Networks Software Load Balancers, distribute the licenses accordingly, and then run it. That should definitely work, so that one will not end up with CPU spikes or that kind of thing. 

The fact that it's a virtual appliance, it's not a hardware appliance, is a great thing because with a hardware appliance it's just one appliance and then you need to buy another one. But with virtual, you can always spin up another server and you can make as many application delivery controllers you want.

Avi Networks has some great innovations. It just didn't fit in with our requirements. I did not go with it because their APM module is a different product altogether. It's a common thing that companies do. They sell something and then they add on top of it as a different product. It is a type of marketing strategy. But when it comes to the overall management, it takes a lot of time to really look into it. If it is one box, great. But when it's one module and then another module and another module, separately, there can be a lot of hassle.

The interface and software features are the most valuable aspects of this solution. 

In terms of improvement, the pricing and documentation need improvement. We have had problems getting the documents. 

I have been using this solution for around three years. 

It's easy to expand. We are currently expanding it. 

We have around 100 applications being run on it. 

I am satisfied with their support. They're good. 

The initial setup is easy. It's easy to install. It's easy for standard and basic configuration. 

It takes a few hours to implement in total. 

I would recommend this solution to anybody considering it. 

In the next release, I would like to see better documentation and better pricing. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.