VMware embraces Google Cloud, Kubernetes with load-balancer upgrades

Continuing to target enterprises that use legacy load-balancing hardware, VMware has upgraded the cloud and Kubernetes support in its core software-based load-balancing controller.

VMware’s NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1, available at the end of the month, has has features to help customers further scale applications across any infrastructure from data centers and private and public clouds while eliminating the need for hardware-based load balancers, said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware.

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Legacy infrastructure can’t deliver applications securely and reliably especially because customers are now looking for elasticity, flexibility and agility. The rise of containers, APIs, and analytics presents an opportunity for infrastructure to become composable, automated and intelligent without the limitations of an appliance-based approach, Gillis said.

Since it bought its load-balancing technology with Avi Networks in 2019, VMware’s Advanced Load Balancer has replaced more than 7,000 hardware-based load balancers, Gillis said.

VMware bought Avi with the plan to punch up its data-center network-virtualization capabilities by adding Avi’s load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology to VMware’s software-defined Virtual Cloud Networking architecture that defines how enterprises can build and control network connectivity and security from the data center across the WAN to multi-cloud environments. 

Avi’s integration with VMware NSX delivers an application-services fabric that synchronizes with the NSX controller to provide automated, elastic load balancing including real-time analytics for applications deployed in a software-defined network environment.

The Avi technology also monitors, scales and reconfigures application services in real time in response to changing performance requirements. The platform also features an Intelligent Web Application Firewall (iWAF) with distributed web-application security fabric to enforce security policies.

Specifically, in NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1, VMware has added tighter integration with the Google Cloud Platform, which lets customers distribute workloads uniformly across the network to improve capacity, efficiency and reliability, the company said.

VMware also said it added a new Kubernetes Ingress Services architecture for multi-cluster, multi-site container deployments which lets customers efficiently distribute workloads across Kubernetes containers.