On Wednesday, VMware announced upgrades to its NSX Advanced Load Balancer while also touting its success in replacing legacy hardware load balancers. Building on its deal to buy Avi Networks just over a year ago, VMware launched its standalone NSX Advanced Load Balancer in 2019. Since then, VMware said it had displaced more than 7,000 hardware-based load balancers including deployments with six of the top-10 U.S. financial firms.
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The legacy application delivery controller (ADC) market was relatively staid until last year with market leaders such as F5 Networks and Citrix. The traditional ADC vendors provision small and large appliances in data centers versus a DevOps, microservices, container-per-application software model that VMware and F5 Networks, through it purchase of NGINX, embrace.
With the latest release, NSX Advanced Load Balance can deliver platform enhancements to enable applications to scale elastically across any infrastructure in data centers and clouds with simplified operations, centralized control, real-time analytics, and end-to-end automation.
The NSX Advanced Load Balancer platform provides local and global load balancing, web application firewall (WAF), application analytics, and Kubernetes ingress services across any data center or cloud.
“The speed of digital business, and the needs of modern applications, have outpaced the capabilities of legacy appliance-based load balancers. They are inflexible, complex to deploy and manage, and expensive,” said VMware's Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit, in a statement. “NSX Advanced Load Balancer is changing all of this for customers, and we are winning with customers as evidenced by the nearly 70% growth in the number of VMware load balancing customers since the acquisition of Avi Networks last year.
"And as the current global pandemic accelerates digital initiatives across all industry segments, NSX Advanced Load Balancer is delivering a modern application delivery architecture to automate and scale applications, helping enable their resiliency and availability across data centers and clouds.”
The new features in NSX Advanced Load Balancer version 20.1 include cloud-scale networking enhancements that simplify global load balancing updates. Those load balancing upgrades can be fully integrated with Google Cloud Platform.
There's also a new architecture for consolidated Kubernetes Ingress Services that are optimized for multi-cluster container deployments, and new customer case management and security services.
As a key pillar of VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution, NSX Advanced Load Balancer helps bring the public cloud experience of automated one-click deployment, pervasive connectivity and visibility, and intrinsic security to the entire network.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer is also agnostic to the underlying environment and delivers load balancing and security software in both VMware and non-VMware environments. VMware expects the next version of its load balancer to be available in its fiscal second quarter, which ends July 31.