What is your primary use case for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Avi Load Balancer is the next-generation load balancer, which VMware provides. Earlier, we used a traditional type of load balancer. Due to the limitation of this traditional load balancer, we deployed this next-generation load balancer. This has very advanced capabilities like a web application firewall and very high-level visibility of an application's traffic flow.

Our primary use case for this solution is for application delivery controls, and the solution is deployed on cloud.

Typically, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is used for application delivery, some security use cases, and some Kubernetes service mesh. The primary use cases of the solution are application delivery and resiliency.