VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer

VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer
Avi Networks Load Balancers

VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously Avi Networks) is a software-defined application delivery platform for contemporary data centers and cloud settings that includes load balancing, web application firewall (WAF), and analytics features. 

What is VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer ?

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer is designed with a distributed, multi-cloud architecture that can be implemented on-premises, in public clouds, or in hybrid cloud scenarios.

It is the barrier that divides the central control plane (Avi Controller) from the distributed data plane (Avi Service Engines). Because the NSX Advanced Load Balancer is entirely REST API-based, it is completely automatable and integrates seamlessly with the CI/CD pipeline for application delivery. 

Fig 1.1-VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer- AVI

NSX Advanced Load Balancer can scale depending on elastic application loads across multi-cloud environments, including bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers, thanks to predictive auto scaling.

The Avi Controller analyses this data and gives administrators with actionable insights via a contemporary web-based user interface that includes role-based access and analytics in a dashboard. 

Application monitoring, end-to-end timing, "network DVR"-like record and review features, searchable traffic logs, security insights, log insights, and client insights are all part of Avi App Insights.

Components of NSX Advance Load Balancer

• NSX ALB Controller: The NSX ALB system's 'brain', which receives topology information supplied by data plane elements and pushes stateless configuration to forwarding engines.
• Service Engines: These will function as data plane components, reporting topology information to the controller and keeping packet level statistics. The SE group contains information about their size, HA, and so forth. Static routes or a default gateway can be configured on SE for a given SE or all SEs as needed.
• Cloud: Containers made comprised of Controllers, SEs/SE groups, and virtual services.
• Virtual Services: Like any other LB, it has IP addresses and ports for listening in on client communications.
• Pools: It consists of a server list and provides monitoring, load balancing, and other functions. A pool group is made up of a list of server pools.
• Health Monitor: This is used to actively check server health by sending a fake transaction to a server or passively observing client experience with the server.
• Gateway monitoring: It is feasible to check the health of the first hop gateway linked to the SEs using ICMP echo.

What are the Key Benefits of VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer ?

Load balancing: In order to improve performance and minimize downtime, NSX Advanced Load Balancer offers a variety of cutting-edge load balancing algorithms that spread traffic over many servers. On the basis of user location and application availability, the platform also has sophisticated global server load balancing (GSLB), which may split traffic across several data centers or clouds.

Application security: The platform comes with an effective web application firewall (WAF) that can defend against a variety of dangers, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other web-based assaults. Administrators may establish and enforce their own security standards by configuring the WAF with custom policies.

Analytics: Advanced analytics features in the NSX Advanced Load Balancer offer instantaneous insights into application performance, user activity, and security risks. To improve analytics and monitoring capabilities, the platform may also interact with external analytics tools like Splunk and ELK.

Automation: Administrators may automate the deployment and administration of their load balancers by integrating the platform with automation tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Terraform.

Kubernetes integration: NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrates natively with Kubernetes and other container orchestration systems, allowing administrators to establish load balancing and security rules for containerized workloads automatically.

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