Broadcom Software and Solutions

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.