The latest version of the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer, introduced Wednesday, offers cloud-scale networking enhancements, a new architecture for consolidated Kubernetes Ingress services, and automated PULSE services.

The company calls NSX Advanced Load Balancer v20.1 a modern software alternative to legacy hardware load balancers. In fact, VMware reports that it has replaced more than 7,000 legacy appliances. The product enhancement news comes on the first anniversary of VMware’s acquisition of application delivery controller (ADC) vendor Avi Networks. VMware first introduced the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, a distributed ADC built for the cloud at VMworld in August 2019.

VMware’s Tom Gillis

“We make the customer’s private cloud infrastructure look, feel and behave like a public cloud,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit at VMware. “Our mission is to create a level of efficiency and automation for our customers in the data center, and having a fully featured, software-defined, scale-out load balancer is an essential part of that mission.”

NSX Advanced Load Balancer is an enterprise-grade load balancing and application security platform built on cloud-native principles and delivered entirely as software. The platform provides local and global load balancing, web application firewall (WAF), application analytics and Kubernetes Ingress services across any data center or cloud. NSX Advanced Load Balancer is agnostic to the underlying environment and delivers load balancing and security software in both VMware and non-VMware environments.

A Closer Look

Here’s more information about the enhancements to the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer, discussed in four buckets.

What differentiates the VMware Advanced Load Balancer is that it’s an integrated solution, offers operational simplicity, offers rich observability with real-time telemetry with application insights across all components, and offers cloud-native automation, according to Chandra Sekar, vice president of marketing, Avi Networks, a VMware company.

Partner Opportunity

Partners are able to take advantage of Avi in the context of VMware Cloud Foundation and NSX.

“We recently announced a security bundle for Cloud Foundation,” said Gillis. “Partners who are already selling NSX and VCF can take advantage of Avi as an add-on solution.”

Additionally, partners can sell Avi as a standalone product. The Avi solution is fully multitenant with fine-grained, role-based access control.

Avi Networks’ Ashish Shah

“We have MSPs building scale-out/scale-in solutions for building managed private clouds as well as private clouds running in their data centers on their customer’s behalf,” said Ashish Shah, vice president of product management and technical marketing at Avi Networks.

VMware is moving full speed ahead with its evolution from a server virtualization company to delivering the software-defined data center and virtual cloud network. Other key changes are also happening.

VMware recently brought Sandy Hogan to lead the company’s renewed partner ecosystem strategy and commercial go-to market, as senior vice president, worldwide commercial and partner sales. She replaces Jenni Flinders, who left VMware in early June.

Flinders gets credit for ushering in VMware Partner Connect, the modernization of its partner program, in March.

And, most interestingly, Dell Technologies is exploring a VMware spinoff. Stay tuned.