VMWare Avi Load Balancer Reviews

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is integrated with VMWare vCenter in our environment and supports more than 1,000 virtual machines, hosting multiple business-critical applications. For any new application deployment, I first create the backend pool and add the application servers as the pool members. Then, I configure the health monitor based on the application protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP. Based on that, we need to create the virtual service with the required VIP config and configure the SSL profile and certificate if HTTPS is required, and select the appropriate load balancing algorithm. We usually prefer round-robin. Once the configuration is completed, I validate the pool health and verify end-to-end connectivity. These are the kinds of day-to-day activities we perform when using VMware Avi Load Balancer. We conduct user acceptance testing and monitor the application through the analytics dashboard before closing if any new server requirements arise.

For day-to-day activities, we perform testing for managing the virtual machines, and for high availability maintenance, we require VMware Avi Load Balancer.

In my organization, VMware Avi Load Balancer is deployed only on-premises. We are not using it in the public and private cloud. We are planning to expand in the public cloud environment, but as of now, we are using it in the on-premises environment. We have a highly-available VMware Avi Load Balancer controller cluster that manages the entire load balancing infrastructure, and we have multiple service engines deployed across different ESXi hosts to process the application traffic and provide redundancy. If any new business applications are onboarded, we create the backend pool and the application servers to configure the health monitors and create the virtual service with the VIP. We are also configuring SSL certification and HTTPS applications.

From my experience, VMware Avi Load Balancer has become a critical component for our application delivery infrastructure. We are managing more than 1,000 virtual machines, which requires a solution that is stable and scalable and easy to administer. VMware Avi Load Balancer has consistently met my company requirements, and features such as health monitoring and centralized management and SSL offloading and detailed analytics have reduced the troubleshooting time and improved the application availability. It integrates well with our VMware vCenter environment, and it also simplifies the onboarding whenever we are getting new applications.

The features we use most frequently in VMware Avi Load Balancer are virtual services, backend pools, health monitoring, and Layer 7 load balancing.

Virtual services are a component of VMware Avi Load Balancer that serves as the primary entry point for the client traffic. In our application, I regularly create and manage the virtual services for the web applications, APIs, and internal business applications. We configure SSL certificates for load balancing the policies and health monitoring at the virtual service.

The best feature of VMware Avi Load Balancer is health monitoring. The most valuable feature for me is the health monitoring capability. In our production environment with more than one thousand virtual machines, it continuously checks the health of the backend application servers. During monthly Windows patching or unexpected application failures, unhealthy pool members are automatically removed from the service. This feature is significantly reducing the traffic directed to unhealthy services without any manual intervention. Once the application server is restored, VMware Avi Load Balancer automatically adds the server back to the pool. This feature has significantly improved the application availability and is reducing the business downtime. Due to this, manual interventions required are minimal, so it is saving time.

VMware Avi Load Balancer is actually a mature and reliable product, but there are areas where it could improve, such as improving the cloud environments. I would like to see more automated root-cause analysis for application failures, predictive analytics for capacity planning, and additional built-in operational reports on the dashboard. Dashboards would also help infrastructure teams during daily monitoring. These are the important areas to improve overall performance.

There are a few areas to improve in the product features, particularly the reporting tools. These are the areas VMware Avi Load Balancer needs to be improved.

I have been using VMware Avi Load Balancer for the last five years.

VMware Avi Load Balancer is very stable. I would like to provide a rating of nine out of ten for this product for stability and scalability. Because it is predefined software solution on hardware compliance only, we do not expect any lagging issues or any latency performance issues. The hardware and infrastructure is very good. Due to this, this product is very stable. With VMware Avi Load Balancer, we cannot expect major downtime for a large-scale environment with 1,000 virtual machines. For any SSL updates, certification things, and any application pool issues, any major troubleshooting also requires minimal downtime. So it is very stable, and I would like to provide the rating as nine.

Scalability has been one of the biggest strengths for VMware Avi Load Balancer in our environment. We currently support the infrastructure with more than 1,000 plus machines and multiple business applications without any performance lagging. If any new applications or demand grows, it gives the stability without causing any network or latency issues. Infrastructure-wise and from a performance perspective, it is giving very high scalability. We are not seeing any kind of performance issues, and simply we have to deploy any new service engines if we expect any new onboard virtual machine services without making any major infrastructure changes. VMware Avi Load Balancer is software defined, and due to that, scaling is very much easier compared with other products and traditional hardware appliances. Moreover, downtime also required is very minimal. That is the reason this scalability is very high, and I would like to provide the scalability rating as nine.

Vendor support for VMware Avi Load Balancer is very positive. For production incidents, we collect the collector logs, service engine logs, and technical support bundles before opening any support request. If we are not able to resolve those issues, for any critical issues, we are engaging the vendor support team. Once we raise the support case through the portal, they immediately assist us, join a call, and they are fixing the issues and providing solutions for any critical application failure issues. The total vendor support is very nice. Their prompt response is very positive. I would like to provide the vendor support rating as nine.

Earlier, we have used Citrix Cloud environment. We moved to VMware Avi Load Balancer. I am adding two points here. Earlier we have used Citrix Cloud and Citrix Zen platform. In that case, we could see many latency issues and performance issues with that platform. After that, we switched to VMware Avi Load Balancer.

Actually, we have evaluated two solutions. One is Citrix, and the other one is Big-IP F5. We verified those products, and after that, from a scalability, reliability, governance, and security point of view, we chose VMware Avi Load Balancer. Cost was also a factor.

VMware is the primary virtualization platform in my organization, so VMware Avi Load Balancer integrates directly with VMware vCenter for simplified management and automation. VMware and its implementation partners supported the initial deployment and provided the best practices for the production configuration. From an operational perspective, its integration with VMware reduced the administrative complexity and it improves the application delivery. It is purely based on the licensing and is enterprise subscription based and depends on the deployment size, service engine capacity, and required features. The licensing cost is higher than open-source alternatives, but automation and analytics and high availability provide strong business value.

This is a large-scale environment, so we are managing 1,000-plus virtual machines. This is a large environment. Without VMware Avi Load Balancer, we would need a large scale of engineers to manage everything, such as checking the health monitoring, checking the faulty VMs, and faulty traffic. We would require skilled people to engage in all these things. However, VMware Avi Load Balancer gives the high availability. Due to that, it is reducing our tasks. We can easily identify from the dashboard whether there is any faulty server and monitor the health checks. It gives the complete visibility, reducing the manual interventions, and saving time. Due to this, the number of skilled engineers required is less with VMware Avi Load Balancer. Due to that, money and time is being saved. I cannot tell the numbers exactly, but this really helps from a money and time perspective.

I would like to give the rating of nine out of ten for VMware Avi Load Balancer because it is an excellent product with centralized management where we can manage every virtual machine in one console. It is reducing the manual intervention. I would like to give 8.5 to nine out of ten.

I would like to suggest this product. I recommend VMware Avi Load Balancer very highly because this product is very stable and scalable from the infrastructure point of view, and AI-driven capabilities are also present and reliability is also very high. This is a centralized management platform that is highly accurate and reliable for the production environments. Health monitors consistently detect the application failures and remove the unhealthy servers from the service and prevent the user impact. Mainly, this analytics engine provides accurate visibility into the traffic, latency response times, and server performance. This all can significantly reduce the troubleshooting time. I would strongly recommend this product to others because this product has a lot of features with very few limitations. My overall rating for VMware Avi Load Balancer is nine out of ten.

My main use case for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is to route the traffic. In my environment, we have more than 3,000 service containers running in the same GKE cluster, and we use its functionality to route the traffic in our service.

We manage 3,000 containers in a distributed platform across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises using vSphere with web-based applications running on multiple backend servers. VMWare Avi Load Balancer plays a vital role in distributing the incoming traffic across servers, ensuring high availability and performance. When a user hits VMWare Avi Load Balancer, it communicates and diverts the traffic to build communication with the necessary backend servers based on the routing path. It is very intelligent as it also handles SSL termination.

The best features VMWare Avi Load Balancer offers include multi-cloud support, seamless integration, and support for all popular cloud providers, which is a great feature for organizations that distribute their workloads across various cloud platforms.

The seamless support in my experience stems from its key advantages, including its software-defined architecture that is fully software-based with no hardware dependencies, featuring a separate control plane, controller, and data plane service engines. It enables flexible deployment across environments and elastic auto-scaling, automatically scaling load balancer capacity based on traffic, then adding and removing service engines dynamically without over-provisioning, which leads to lower infrastructure costs and efficient handling of sudden traffic spikes. Multi-cloud and hybrid support is a very important feature that it offers.

I appreciate centralized management in VMWare Avi Load Balancer as I do not want to distribute my routing scripts for each load balancer. All configurations can be handled through the controller UI or API itself, eliminating the need to configure each load balancer separately. Advanced analytics and visibility allow me to monitor latency, error, traffic patterns, and everything in real time.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer positively impacts my organization by including a web application firewall, DDoS protection, and bot mitigation, which are great security features. We faced DDoS attacks at least twice a month as our client, Moneycontrol, has the largest web-based architecture and web-based services, making DDoS attacks very common there. After using VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we feel there have been no recent DDoS attacks.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer can be improved in various ways, as it follows a pay-as-you-go model, which still makes it quite pricey and a little expensive for startups or small-scale industries. They have to pay a lot to use it, and they may not find it reliable for their environment, but for enterprise-level or larger organizations, this tool is excellent.

The product's stability has some bugs, and there are reports suggesting quick upgrades. New releases may require patches and fixes. The learning curve for new users is quite tough since the architecture controller and service engine differ from traditional ADCs, requiring an understanding of cloud concepts and networking, plus DevOps. It also has limited advanced traffic control compared to F5 due to a lack of flexibility with F5 rules. It can accept all traffic routes and paths, but when using an advanced setting like an F5 rule, it is not highly flexible with traffic scripting.

I have been working in my current field for five years.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is stable based on my experience. However, some bugs occasionally arise at the UI level, yet its functionality remains really good.

I would rate the scalability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer a perfect ten out of ten because it senses traffic and scales automatically, also scaling down when there is no need, making it very elastic, resulting in zero costs when there is no traffic, which is excellent.

We have experienced really good customer support from them. They are quite responsive, taking the necessary time to address our issues, and they do not hold our tickets. They strive to close them as soon as they understand our problems.

We previously used Anthos Service Mesh, but it proved to be unstable regarding multi-cloud support, which is the only reason we switched to VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that its pricing is quite pricier compared to Anthos Service Mesh, but it still proves to be a good solution even though it costs more. It routes the traffic without causing any downtime for our client, remaining stable, and that is why we are using it.

We purchased VMWare Avi Load Balancer from direct sales, which is the primary method. Since VMWare is now owned by Broadcom, the official way to procure it is through the Broadcom VMWare sales team, and our company account manager had a conversation with them to procure it.

In terms of return on investment, earlier we used to experience many DDoS attacks, but nowadays, those attacks have reduced, and the security threats are managed seamlessly. VMWare Avi Load Balancer remediates the business flow properly and maintains good trends.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that its pricing is quite pricier compared to Anthos Service Mesh, but it still proves to be a good solution even though it costs more. It routes the traffic without causing any downtime for our client, remaining stable, and that is why we are using it.

Before choosing VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we did not evaluate other options extensively. We considered using NGINX Ingress controller, but we ultimately wanted a more premium solution, so we opted for VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

If you are using your service across multiple clouds and looking for a good Ingress controller and load balancer, you can confidently pick VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

I would rate the accuracy and reliability of output seven out of ten.

We have not used VMWare Avi Load Balancer's AI capabilities yet, but we are trying to find a way to implement them in the future. It has features for predicting and auto-scaling, including AI-driven scaling, where it uses user traffic patterns and historical data to predict future loads and automatically scale service engines based on data from our service. The application performance analytics collects real-time telemetry from traffic and uses intelligent analytics to show latency breakdown, error trends, and response time anomalies. We have a good opinion from our end on these aspects, but we are still finding a way to integrate it into our workload as AI is still in a growing stage, so we are taking time to integrate it.

Nothing stands out, as everything looks good. I have assigned an overall review rating of seven to VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

I have been using VMWare Avi Load Balancer as a database engineer for the past three to five years. Most of our dependent databases, virtual IPs, and cluster dependencies have numerous connections and dependencies to VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

Our main use case for VMWare Avi Load Balancer involves numerous clusters for our database environment with many independent computers connecting to each other with Windows failover clustering. Primarily for databases, we use it for high availability and failover handling, replication awareness, and resiliency to avoid having one point of failure. A major use case is for database proxies, often using ProxySQL and PgBouncer. Instead of exposing our connection pooler directly, we place an Avi VIP in the middle, followed by PgBouncer nodes as our connection pooler, and then the database. This approach provides high availability at the connection endpoint and allows us to scale PgBouncer horizontally.

A specific example of when VMWare Avi Load Balancer made a difference for my team involves our read-write splitting for MySQL and PostgreSQL. We have read-write traffic to the primary and read traffic to replicas. We use Avi for L4 load balancing for database pods on port 5432 for MySQL and port 3306 for PostgreSQL, using TCP health checks and routing based on service pools.

Another scenario involves PostgreSQL high availability with Patroni on VMware VMs. We have three PostgreSQL VMs managed by Patroni running on VMware vSphere, with the VIP managed by VMWare Avi Load Balancer. The architecture flows from the application to the Avi virtual IP to the PostgreSQL clusters. Without Avi, the problem would be that the application would connect directly to PostgreSQL, and if PostgreSQL crashes, Patroni promotes the second PostgreSQL instance, but the application still points to the old IP, which causes connections to fail. With Avi, this is managed through a pool of nodes that are managed and provide interchange high availability.

Apart from use cases for primary replica routing, read-write splitting, high availability for database proxies, and Kubernetes with databases, VMWare Avi Load Balancer integrates with Kubernetes, allowing auto-discovery of services and dynamic scaling. VMWare Avi Load Balancer also provides cloud-native database as a service platform for internet database platforms, which enables integration of database as a service that requires numerous connections.

Beyond helping with load balancing, VMWare Avi Load Balancer offers features that extend beyond traditional load balancers. VMWare Avi Load Balancer is a software-defined solution with the capability of cloud-native delivery controller, unlike legacy hardware load balancers such as F5 or Citrix. Avi is API-driven, allowing enhanced capabilities and easy integration with existing tools in our environment. I am able to manage PostgreSQL and MySQL in distributed systems, which is significant. It uses a controller and service engine model, providing the capability of creating policies, analyzing data, performing advanced configurations, and managing service engines.

Regarding how the controller and service engine model has helped my team, I compare Avi architecture with Patroni and PostgreSQL. For VMWare Avi Load Balancer, the controller acts as the brain by storing configuration and policies, monitoring health, and handling automation via API without directly managing traffic. In contrast, Patroni in a cluster communicates with etcd to monitor node health and elect the primary. In Avi, traffic is handled by service engines, which are lightweight VMs or containers that accept client traffic, perform load balancing, and apply SSL termination when necessary. This clean separation of control makes things easier when compared to native clustering.

Policy creation is where VMWare Avi Load Balancer truly differentiates itself from traditional load balancers. When people hear "load balancer," they typically think of round-robin traffic distribution, but Avi is policy-driven. Traffic behavior is managed using different policy layers, meaning traffic is not just distributed but rules are defined determining how traffic should behave. For example, if health checks fail, the node is removed immediately from traffic routing.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer has positively impacted my organization by changing how we manage databases, mainly for load balancing and creating VIPs that prevent a single point of failure. When a node goes down, we can quickly redirect to another node using failover and priority policies, which Avi helps define, such as active-passive pool or priority-based routing. This is especially effective for disaster recovery, allowing us to weigh primary and disaster recovery sites. Since implementing VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we no longer need to manually change IP addresses in our configuration, as Avi automates this process, which controls traffic and network appropriately, adding a layer of security and assurance. Additionally, monitoring dashboards are easier to view, as we have access to extensive logs and data.

In my opinion, VMWare Avi Load Balancer is a complicated tool with many advanced features that can be beneficial, but policies are powerful yet difficult to debug when traffic behaves unexpectedly or becomes heavy. This complexity can make it challenging to pinpoint where a request goes. The need for policy execution tracing to simplify debugging is evident because if connections are routed incorrectly, for example, directly to a replica, debugging can become painful in production.

There are still improvements to be made, particularly in simpler policy debugging. A clearer view of traffic routing for each database would greatly enhance the experience.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is stable in my experience so far.

The scalability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is beneficial. In my role as a database engineer, scalability works in two layers and rarely becomes a bottleneck.

The support for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is really good, and the integration with other tools is really effective, which makes the overall experience smoother.

The customer support for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is quite good, especially because we already have VMware tools and products in our environment, making the support experience as expected and very satisfactory.

Before VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we used F5, but it did not provide the custom policies and advanced features we needed for our database management.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is deployed in our organization in a common architecture where we operate both on-premises and in the cloud due to our vSphere and data center infrastructure setup. We have the cluster usually deployed in three VMs with high availability setups and service engines deployed as VMs automatically. While I am not directly involved in configurations, I know that creating a virtual service, such as a database endpoint, is straightforward as the controller pushes configuration, service engines spawn on the ESXi host, and traffic flows through to backend servers such as our PostgreSQL or MySQL nodes.

A clear return on investment has been reported from the deployment completed about two years ago. VMWare Avi Load Balancer has created a smoother failover process without issues, keeping the state normal, where typically there would be manual intervention. Time lost went from potentially five minutes down to under thirty seconds with Avi, resulting in no recorded incidents.

I did not participate directly in pricing, setup cost, and licensing for VMWare Avi Load Balancer, as that responsibility falls to another functional team. However, I know that it was an internal decision and that it operates on a capacity and consumption model, unlike traditional appliances that charge based on hardware.

Before choosing VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we evaluated other options, with F5 BIG-IP being the main contender in our environment. Its weaknesses included being hardware-heavy, legacy, having slow automation, and limited options for policy settings. We also considered HAProxy as one of the alternatives.

My advice for others looking into using VMWare Avi Load Balancer is to assess the environment and what you aim to achieve. VMWare Avi Load Balancer is powerful and delivers great value when designed appropriately from your specific use case. Keeping initial policies simple is crucial to avoid complications once in production.

My key advice for teams adopting VMWare Avi Load Balancer is to first design the architecture, review use cases, keep initial policy simple, and treat health checks and failover behavior as production-critical logic, especially for databases. I choose a rating of nine because while VMWare Avi Load Balancer has many strong points, there are still improvements to be made, particularly in simpler policy debugging.

For my day-to-day activities, I have been using VMWare Avi Load Balancer for the last five years. This includes monitoring virtual machines, services, checking backend pool health, reviewing health monitor status, validating application availability after server patching, coordinating with the applications teams during maintenance, updating SSL certificates when required, reviewing alerts from the AVI dashboard, and assisting in troubleshooting application connectivity issues. I also verify that traffic is being distributed correctly across the healthy backend servers and ensure there is no impact to the production servers. These are my regular activities with this product.

A unique way I use VMWare Avi Load Balancer is through its centralized management, which allows us to manage all VMs in one place easily and provides high availability. Out of the 500 machines, whenever a server becomes unresponsive, this load balancer effectively manages applications and maintains high uptime.

In our environment, the most frequently used features include virtual services, backend pools, and health monitors. As I mentioned, we also utilize SSL offloading, Layer 7 load balancing, and analytics. We rely on health monitors to ensure traffic is sent only to healthy application servers. Virtual services and pools distribute user traffic across multiple backend VMs. We use the analytics dashboard to monitor application performance and troubleshoot issues. During maintenance or patching activities, we validate that all pool members are healthy and check that applications are accessible through the configured VIP.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer has positively impacted my organization by automating tasks, simplifying administration, and reducing the workload. For example, it automatically identifies unresponsive servers, which reduces manual logins, and by providing centralized management, we can access any virtual machine using its console. This has significantly improved application availability and reliability by distributing traffic across multiple healthy servers, preventing any single server from becoming overloaded. Its built-in health monitoring detects unhealthy servers, redirects traffic to healthy ones, and reduces downtime. The centralized dashboard offers clear visibility into application performance, facilitating faster troubleshooting and reducing manual intervention, ultimately enhancing user experience.

For instance, we recently experienced a backend server failure, where an application server became unavailable. The AVI health monitor detected this unhealthy server quickly and automatically removed it from the backend pool, redirecting all incoming traffic to the remaining healthy server, allowing continuous access to the application without outage. After the application teams restored the services, AVI automatically added that server back to the backend pool. During our monthly Windows patching activity, we patch one application server at a time, ensuring it does not service client traffic before rebooting. AVI routes all traffic to healthy servers while the patched server reboots and, once it passes health checks, it begins receiving traffic again, allowing us to perform maintenance with minimal user impact. These scenarios show significant reductions in downtime.

The best features of VMWare Avi Load Balancer that I appreciate most include centralized management, intelligent health monitoring, automated load balancing, and an analytics dashboard that provides clear visibility into application performance and traffic patterns. It helps during troubleshooting when servers are unresponsive and supports SSL offloading, application persistence, and both Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing. The software-defined architecture simplifies day-to-day load balancer administration and makes it easier to scale without relying on dedicated hardware appliances.

The AI capabilities of VMWare Avi Load Balancer continually analyze applications, monitoring traffic, response times, latency, throughput, and error rates to detect abnormal behavior. This platform automatically identifies performance anomalies and provides insights into potential bottlenecks before they affect users. It also offers predictive capacity planning by analyzing traffic trends over time, which helps infrastructure teams troubleshoot issues faster and make informed decisions on scaling and performance optimization.

One improvement needed for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is that its advanced features require good product knowledge; technically skilled individuals are necessary to effectively manage and monitor the AVI health dashboard and alerts.

From an operational perspective, I would like to see more proactive alerting and root cause analysis features within the dashboard, which would help administrators identify issues faster without the need to collect logs from multiple sources. A more simplified operating system interface would enable easier identification of alerts directly on the dashboard without reviewing logs.

Additional improvements for VMWare Avi Load Balancer include providing built-in troubleshooting guidance for administrators during fault analysis, predefined dashboards, and reporting templates for daily operations, as well as expanding automation and templates for common deployment scenarios to reduce manual configuration. Better documentation for advanced features would benefit new administrators. Overall, the product meets most operational requirements, but these minor improvements are necessary.

I have been using VMWare Avi Load Balancer for the last five years, and I am currently using this product.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is stable.

Yes, VMware AVI Load Balancer has been very stable in our production environment. We use it to load balance several business-critical applications running on more than 1,000 virtual machines integrated with VMware vCenter. The platform has consistently delivered high availability with minimal unplanned interruptions. During monthly Windows patching and maintenance activities, AVI automatically redirects traffic to healthy backend servers, ensuring continuous application access. The Service Engines have performed reliably under normal and peak traffic conditions without affecting application performance. Health Monitors accurately detect backend server issues and automatically restore traffic once the servers recover. We have also completed AVI version upgrades with proper planning and validation while maintaining service continuity. Most incidents we encounter are related to backend application or server issues rather than the AVI platform itself. The centralized management and analytics further improve operational stability by enabling faster troubleshooting. Overall, I would rate the stability of VMware AVI Load Balancer 9.5 out of 10 for enterprise production environments.

Regarding scalability, it is very good in my organization. As new applications or servers are added, creating new virtual services and pools is straightforward without major infrastructure changes. The platform efficiently handles application traffic for around 500-plus virtual machines without performance issues, making the scaling process easier compared to traditional hardware load balancers.

My experience with VMware support has generally been positive. For any critical production issues, support engineers respond promptly and assist with troubleshooting. Knowledge base articles and product documentation are very useful for resolving common issues, and while complex cases may require log collection and remote troubleshooting, they are usually handled professionally. Overall, I find the vendor support to be responsive and technical.

Initially, applications relied on dedicated load balancers and DNS-based traffic distribution, being accessed directly through individual servers. As our infrastructure grew, high availability became a requirement, leading us to choose VMWare Avi Load Balancer to provide centralized load balancing, health monitoring, and improved application availability. Before this, we had used DNS-based traffic distribution and F5 BIG-IP for load balancing.

The initial setup was moderately complex because it involved coordination between the VMware, networking, security, and application teams. The AVI Controller had to be integrated with VMware vCenter, followed by the deployment of Service Engines on the ESXi cluster. Network connectivity, VLANs, DNS, routing, and firewall rules were validated before publishing any applications. After the infrastructure was ready, we configured Virtual Services, backend Pools, Health Monitors, and SSL profiles based on application requirements. The initial planning took time, but once the platform was deployed, onboarding new applications became straightforward. VMware's documentation and implementation best practices helped simplify the deployment process. Overall, I would describe the initial setup as well planned and manageable for an enterprise environment, especially with proper coordination across teams

I have seen a return on investment, as VMWare Avi Load Balancer reduces the time required for application deployment and troubleshooting by managing all virtual services, pools, health monitors, and SSL certificates from a single console. This streamlines routine administrative tasks and saves time and money from a business perspective by improving application availability and minimizing downtimes. Its software-defined approach reduces reliance on dedicated hardware load balancers, and by automating health monitoring and traffic distribution, it diminishes manual operational efforts, saving both time and money.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, senior administrators manage this aspect, and I am not fully aware of it. However, I can say that compared to other products, the pricing for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is good. Deployment costs vary based on multiple factors such as negotiations and the deployment model, with the pricing being subscription-based, depending on the edition, number of service engines, and features utilized in VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

My usual use cases for VMWare Avi Load Balancer include load balancing to two UAGs in AWS.

Within the last 12 months, I have been working with VMware, and VMware Cloud has moved on quite a lot now with some Universal Broker capabilities, so I could probably update my implementation. I work with VMWare Avi Load Balancer regularly.

What I have found most valuable about VMWare Avi Load Balancer is that it allows me to use it as an edge resource for the UAGs for remote access in a GSLB solution.

The special capability I appreciate about VMWare Avi Load Balancer is its ease of use; it is very lightweight and quite inexpensive to deploy.

With VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I track bandwidth usage mainly, and that is obviously useful for our network team as I use it for tracking bandwidth.

Overall, VMWare Avi Load Balancer has positively impacted our operation, as it gives us true redundancy for our UAGs for remote access.

I think VMWare Avi Load Balancer could be improved or enhanced because it has minimal health monitors, and it would also be beneficial to have true VMWare Avi Load Balancer failover at the VMWare Avi Load Balancer level. On the whole, it does what we need it to do.

I want that capacity so we can then be redundant on our redundancy, and we would not need a GSLB solution.

I have been working with VMWare Avi Load Balancer for probably about a year.

VMWare Avi Load Balancer is very reliable and stable.

The stability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer impacts remote access significantly because we are using it to load balance the remote access functionality in the UAGs.

The scalability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is not great, but it does what it needs to do in the single appliance we have, so that is acceptable.

When I say it is not great, I mean in the sense that you need a GSLB solution in front of VMWare Avi Load Balancer anyway; it does not have built-in failover capabilities.

I would appreciate Broadcom improving scalability in the future.

I do not often communicate with the technical support of VMWare Avi Load Balancer, as we have a third-party managed consultancy that handles that part.

I do use official documentation, guides, and manuals provided by Broadcom, such as their knowledge base.

I find their knowledge base limited and very difficult to navigate for finding information.

Before using VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we used Kemps.

I participated in the initial setup of VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

During the initial setup, the process was straightforward, involving a wizard to deploy the VIPs and then set up the health monitors; it took approximately half an hour.

I have not encountered any challenges or issues, as it has been running smoothly.

I have not found any return on investment so far, as it does not really lend itself to that; it is more about not having to stand up another data center for redundancy. We save costs in that way rather than costs on usage.

We decided to switch from Kemps to VMWare Avi Load Balancer because Kemps does not support the heartbeat monitor in AWS, and therefore you cannot actually fail over between them; we cannot determine if the two devices have failed over.

Before choosing VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I evaluated other options, specifically Kemps.

I find the metric of bandwidth usage important because it obviously allows us to reduce costs over time and during peak usage.

For application security, VMWare Avi Load Balancer WAF protection is not used as we do not need that; we have GSLB.

I do not use VMWare Avi Load Balancer's multi-cloud capability, as that is what we got GSLB for.

The API-driven infrastructure as code feature has not been effective for us, as we do not use that and instead deploy it manually and then use it.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

We are using native cloud capability.

The issue is not from us. VMware changed their module. They are selling perpetual licenses with multi-year support. The reason for this change is to make their offering similar to Palo Alto and other technology providers. They started selling something called VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, which is based on credits. When people start converting or translating the number of their physical cores to actual hypervisor cores using VCF, they are surprised with extremely high prices. Additionally, VMware sent an email to OCI and other hypervisors stating they will not sell their integrated product with them anymore. If any client comes to them, they must take their hardware and come directly to Broadcom as VMware has changed ownership. They must buy VCF licenses directly from Broadcom. Here is the catch: they request an extremely high price to do version upgrades. Some clients refuse because they question why they should be charged for an upgrade when VMware made the change to their product. Even when we take a very high discount for those clients, they decide to move out of VMware.

We work with VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

To be honest, for load balancers, it is not about the features. They are all similar. F5, A10, and VMWare Avi Load Balancer all have comparable functionality. Even native capability for load sharing can be accomplished from Fortinet or Palo Alto without the need to add additional tools. However, it is easier here in Saudi Arabia for people to understand F5, so we commonly use F5. This was a specific requirement where a client asked for VMWare Avi Load Balancer, but to be honest, nothing is special compared to other options. We use it for internal traffic between applications, but this could be done even with F5.

I did not work in the dashboard as much as I have seen the F5 and other dashboards because it is only one client using VMWare Avi Load Balancer. As a presales professional, I am not typically hands-on. However, I follow up very closely on my projects, even after they exceed the presales stage. I regularly visit my clients to assess their satisfaction. During these visits, I get involved in sessions and understand what risks occurred, what happened, and what difficulties they experienced. But this is more common in the market.

The issue with load balancers is that they are all the same. I would rate it seven.

I do not recall VMWare Avi Load Balancer having WAF protection. We use WAF and for this specific case, we use F5.

It is not about VMWare Avi Load Balancer itself. For multi-cloud capability, you need to do NSX Extended and HCX in VMware. This is what will give you the flavor of multi-cloud. Others will be resources because once you reach NSX Extended, all resources will be under one cloud management. So it does not matter. It is not a feature in VMWare Avi Load Balancer that would be responsible for multi-cloud capability. Multi-cloud capability comes from a configuration called NSX Extended.

It is very expensive. The pricing is expensive in that it is only an add-on. From my opinion, they should lower the price.

Two and a half.

I have a really mixed experience. Some resources were extremely good. Some resources did not reach out, and I do not understand how they work in such a big enterprise without caring about requirements. Some resources were extremely good during the presales stage and even during implementation. However, some resources did not care at all. When I take on a project, I start making another assessment with the client, and I see that some scope is missing. The solution architect from VMware side told me that there would be no issue adding them. Here we are with an RFP, and we cannot add them easily. Once you take the project, the full amount and full BOQ are set, and you cannot change them. He is working in Saudi Arabia, so it was very strange that someone with experience in the Saudi market would say such things after awarding.

I am not happy with their support. There are some people who work with me from VMware who are very professional and very expert. Even when we have difficulty in VDI and other technology, they dig in, troubleshoot, and find the solution, even if it is not their issue. But overall, I did not rate it good. I rate it three out of ten.

Neutral

It is more common in the market. So it is easier to use because it is more common.

The one that is easiest to use is OCI. If it is load balancing, it is OCI. If it is load sharing, then I would say Fortinet or something similar.

It is an independent solution. Partner.

We tested some scripts, but they did not fulfill everything.

My recommendation is to reduce the price and make it two separate products, not only as an add-on for VMware. It should not be necessary to use it with VMware.

I gave this product a rating of three out of ten.

The analytics dashboard of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is quite handy. Analytics provides a lot of details, which is something that all organizations use. This is one aspect of the dashboard that is used pretty commonly.

For predictive scaling with VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I look over the overall analytics and end-to-end round trip times. A few customers would go deep into all the aspects, looking into virtual services and health monitoring, and maybe the custom health monitors as well. This provides quite end-to-end monitoring.

The features I find most valuable in VMWare Avi Load Balancer are the load balancing part and the WAF part. It is quite a handy solution. When I compare it with NetScaler, the load balancing part and the web application firewall part are the two most handy parts.

When it comes to improvements for VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I think the documentation part needs a bit of work. The original documentation which was on the Avi Vantage website in the good old days was really rich documentation. The documentation needs to improve, as it was really handy a couple of years back.

Apart from the documentation for VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I think a bit more on the GSLB part can be improved, and maybe something additional into the monitoring side of the solution.

I have been familiar with VMWare Avi Load Balancer for a couple of years.

From a stability point of view, VMWare Avi Load Balancer is stable.

Scalability-wise, VMWare Avi Load Balancer is good. From my interactions, scalability is not an issue.

From a competition perspective, a lot of organizations use F5. Quite a few organizations use Citrix ADC as well, and that is pretty common today. I think the competition is between these three.

Regarding the benefit of VMWare Avi Load Balancer's WAF protection, I think the heuristics are pretty common. I do not come across many trainings for the WAF part, but once in a while. I cannot comment much on whether organizations are using it or not.

In terms of VMWare Avi Load Balancer's multi-cloud capability, I have not come across many organizations using it across the different platforms. It is primarily used in the VMware context only. I have not seen anyone using it purely from a Linux or AWS or Azure perspective. Most of the organizations I come across are primarily using it from the VMware side.

As for the API-driven infrastructure as code feature of VMWare Avi Load Balancer, because I am not from the developer side, I think that is more for the developers or maybe for integrating some new solutions and digging something deeper into it. That is quite handy.

Regarding ease of use with VMWare Avi Load Balancer, that is pretty okay.

For implementation, people find it quite okay to implement. There is nothing much from the implementation side.

I think VMWare should promote their product more, particularly from the VMWare Avi Load Balancer side. It may be promoted a little bit more. Apart from Avi, most of those are already well-known. I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

I am familiar with VMWare Avi Load Balancer, and we use it currently in our environment.

I have been working with VMWare Avi Load Balancer since we moved away from NSX-T to their advanced load balancer.

NSX removed the advanced load balancer feature, so we had a vCloud Director that originally had a load balancer on NSX-T. We migrated that to Avi for our public URL. We started with that and then we began publishing internet services via VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

The best features of VMWare Avi Load Balancer that I appreciate include its simplicity, where I no longer have to put my VIPs on my firewall and configure the back-end pool at different places. It provides that single pane of glass for the load balancing functionality, and it is much cheaper than F5 load balancers and other load balancer products out there.

Pricing is a plus for me, and the integration into NSX makes adding certificates and using different cipher formats much simpler with VMWare Avi Load Balancer.

I have used VMWare Avi Load Balancer's analytical dashboard for monitoring connections coming through and which countries they are coming from, but I do not report on it extensively.

I have not used containerization or Tanzu on our environment.

I have not used VMWare Avi Load Balancer's WAF protection for application security because we have a basic license on VMWare Avi Load Balancer and we do not use many of the features.

I have not touched the API-driven infrastructure as code feature, and I do not think I will get to it now because I am far away from technical work.

I moved a few months back after working with VMWare before that.

I do not use the technical support much, and I have been in IT for about 24 years with a strong skill set in VMWare environment. When a call is logged, they normally fix the problem before the support gets hold of it. However, since Broadcom took over, their support levels have dropped, and I would not give them a 5 now; maybe a 4, because they take too long to get back to you.

I chose VMWare due to the look and feel compared to other vendors such as XCP-ng, Platform9, and Apache CloudStack. The ease of use without complex cloud bridges and bonding is important since my stack is set up with MSO and ACI. There are no plans to change over the next five years as far as I know.

We wanted to make sure that the load balancing was done correctly, ensuring that the requests coming through were balancing to the back-end pools correctly.

Regarding the pricing of VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I believe it is expensive. We use the basic version, which is stripped down and allows only two vCPUs and about 10 services per service engine.

For VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I would rate ease of use as maybe an 8 or 9, costing a 6, and while the feature set has many nice features, I have not had the opportunity to work with them yet, so in total, I would give it a rating of 7.

In my company, we use Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as a global load balancer since its best points are its interface, and good infrastructure, making it a very modernized tool.

There are different region servers for which we require a global load balancer in our organization, so we prefer Avi Networks Software Load Balancer.

The most valuable feature of the solution for my organization is its UI since it allows us to see the clusters while providing a very specific and good overall understanding.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer needs to improve its documentation. If there is no documentation in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer, we need to search for a new trainer, for which we spend time searching and contacting trainers via websites.

I have been using Avi Networks Software Load Balancer for a year. I am a customer of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

The solution gets used in my company twenty-four hours and seven days a week.

The solution's technical support is of high quality. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

My company had used a different load balancer in the past. My company chose Avi Networks Software Load Balancer because of its modernization and efficiency over other solutions.

The initial setup of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer was easy.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

I haven't experienced any return on investment using the solution.

I rate the solution price a four to five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, since it is an affordable tool.

There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing costs attached to the solution.

My company wants to use Varnish Software as an application-level load balancer and F5 as a layer for load balancing.

My company chose Avi Networks Software Load Balancer because it's a software-based tool, more flexible and easier to scale.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance.

I think Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is very easy to configure, a good software, and a good platform overall. It's easy to use, making it better for the user.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

The use case is very isolated right now. It's got very specific use cases. It's not a product that we deploy across due to our support infrastructure.

Whether or not it improves our environment just now is 50/50. I can't say that it does. And I can't say that it harms it either as they're very specific use cases. Our operational support infrastructure does not have the knowledge base to support it yet. It's still a work in progress.

The integration into the host environment is the most valuable aspect right now.

The solution is stable.

It's fairly easy to get it up and running. 

It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that.

It's not fully grown up. Other people might think that, however, our comparison against a product line that we use shows it's not as grown up as the existing product line.

We'd like it to be more open to third-party integration.

Their salespeople can be a bit aggressive. They're trying to get into an area that is dominated by large vendors elsewhere. So they tend to be a little bit more aggressive than some people would like.

We haven't used it too much. We are running a comparison analysis right now. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable to a point, however, not in comparison to our hardware platforms. It's not as scalable as that. It is a software product and due to how our infrastructure is, it's very hard to scale. Auto scale is what we would want based on our management infrastructure.

Most of the people who use it regularly are application developers. 

I'm not sure if we will increase usage. We're still analyzing it and have to do that at a larger scale first.

I've dealt with support in the past. It's limited only as it's not a full-scale production deployment. They're very individualized use cases.

Once you get it set up, it's straightforward. It takes longer than a typical hardware product as it is a software product, and due to the fact that there are different teams that we have to work with to get it built out that we don't really manage over. The setup is a little bit longer than a typical scenario with our focus product.

A very small number of people handle any maintenance tasks as it's not fully implemented yet.

Everything primarily s done in-house. For these types of product lines, we do the implementations ourselves.

We haven't yet seen an ROI as we have very specific use cases right now. 

The pricing is good. It's pretty inexpensive. 

The pricing is moderate. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability.

We looked at other options. We have our main product line. We evaluated this, and other vendors as well. We evaluated NGINX, for example, and everything in all scenarios. My main concern is this solution is not as mature as other options. 

I'm not sure which version number we are on. It's one of the latest, I assume. We don't run the latest. We usually are either one or two versions behind.

It is something we are exploring. We do have use cases and it will compete against our existing product line. That would have to go in the second half of this year. Right now, it's more of a comparison of how we use it right now. We don't use it really in production. We are going to definitely explore it and do our comparison and more in-depth analysis of the product and compare it against our existing product line.

I'd advise potential users to do a very in-depth analysis of the products in comparison. And don't just look at the cover of it - really look into the detailed backend support infrastructure and if it can be implemented the way you need it to be.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten. It's not a fully mature product.