Switzerland never takes sides. Safeguarding its independence is one of the principal objectives of Swiss foreign policy. And Swiss neutrality, one of the main principles of this policy, dictates that Switzerland remain agnostic.

Hailed as the Switzerland of load balancers, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) doesn’t take sides either. It is environment-agnostic. Designed to save you from costly re-platforming, retooling, and retraining, Avi offers the same great user experience regardless of the number or types of underlying infrastructure that support your apps. So you get a consistent experience, across any cloud, every time. The Avi platform enables a fast, scalable, and secure application delivery experience.

Network Automation and Advanced Load Balancing: Better Together

Customers invest in VMware NSX to achieve network automation and deploy a software-defined data center (SDDC) or private cloud that is programmable. However, they have historically used either the native NSX load balancer or legacy load balancers such as F5 or Citrix. Neither solution is adequate for the level of automation — and the enterprise-grade load balancing functions — that customers hope to enjoy with NSX.

Customers deploying VMware NSX-T need an integrated, automation-driven, multi-cloud application services solution. Avi integrates with NSX-T, simplifies Day 0 deployments, and improves operational efficiency for Day 2 and beyond. In short, it automates the heavy lifting while simplifying the end-user experience.

Every app needs a load balancer. And every NSX deployment needs Avi.

Avi provides a software load balancer, intelligent web application firewall, GSLB,  and container ingress services from data center to cloud.

So, whether you’re deploying Avi into a vSphere platform on-premises, or in a public cloud like Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure, we deliver full lifecycle management and a single solution to bring all of these together.

With deep integrations within the VMware portfolio, Avi provides unparalleled advantages when load balancing for NSX — as well as for Horizon, Tanzu, etc.

No Proprietary Hardware

The first thing to know is that Avi is 100% software. We are not tied to any proprietary hardware. Nor are we tied to costly refresh cycles of physical hardware appliances.

Centralized Management and Full Automation

The second thing to know is that our management philosophy is radically different from managing individual devices — or even from managing a central manager of managers. Avi separates the control plane from the data plane. Its 100% API-based architecture enables self-service provisioning and integration into the CI/CD pipeline for application delivery.

Comprehensive Analytics & Insights

Avi offers a huge amount of telemetry. Over 800 metrics per application bring information from the data plane back into the control plane to give you better observability into your applications.

Dynamic Capacity Management

Most legacy solutions use static capacity. But Avi is a totally scalable architecture for ANY cloud on ANY ecosystem. We can scale up on demand and then scale back down on demand — so you’re not overprovisioning and building more and more load balancers.

Extend Your Benefits Further with Rich Integration Between NSX and Avi

Avi and NSX-T are distinct platforms. Both build meaningful integrations to provide simplified and seamless workflows, making it operationally easier for customers like you and me to integrate and consume. Any of us, in any account, on any app, on any platform, at any location. How Swiss of us. No other provider can give you this experience.

Avi integrates into NSX and NSX integrates into Avi, enabling the two different consumption models shown in the figure below.

Avi Integrates with NSX-T

Avi integrates with NSX-T to provide automated load balancing and enable seamless DFW programmability to secure your applications. This extends Avi’s multi-cloud, intent-based application delivery to NSX environments.

Integrating Avi into NSX-T can be done using policy APIs to install and configure Avi through the NSX-T UI. That’s the most prescriptive way of deploying Avi in an NSX environment. So, it’s easy to consume: you don’t really have to think about how it’s running, it just runs.

Avi can provide load balancing to ANY app on ANY platform with the Avi Controller deployed ANYWHERE (AWS, vCenter, etc.).

NSX Integrates into Avi

Love the NSX user interface and don’t want to change? Your experience of consuming load balancing can remain the same even after you migrate to Avi. No other provider can give you this experience. Avi can be managed through NSX only in NSX environments.

NSX-T provides integrations to simplify consumption of Avi as well. After seamlessly deploying Avi Controller through NSX-T Manager, you can consume basic load balancing use cases that NSX-T native load balancer supports through the NSX-T UI and API. 

Avi is VMware’s load balancing platform, and the native NSX load balancer will be end-of-life at a future date. Customers are strongly recommended to onboard apps directly to Avi to avoid migration at a later date.

For advanced use cases, my recommendation is to consume Avi directly using automation (e.x., vRA, vRO, Ansible, Terraform) or the Avi UI/API.

Tools for Migrating Load Balancers to NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) 

And by the way, if you are an NSX customer, you can easily migrate to Avi.

With the release of NSX-T 3.2, the Migration Coordinator service allows customers to migrate their load balancers configured on NSX-v to NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi). If you are migrating NSX- v through NSX-T Migration Coordinator’s Bring Your Own Topology (BYOT) configuration, you’ll enjoy a simple, seamless migration path to Avi. If you are using any other Migration Coordinator workflow, load balancers in NSX-v must be migrated to NSX-T first. 

We will be releasing a standalone NSX-T to NSX ALB (Avi) migration tool that will enable customers to seamlessly migrate their load balancers on NSX-T to NSX ALB (Avi). 

Load balancers that are migrated to NSX-T native load balancer from NSX-v can leverage this standalone tool to migrate load balancers to Avi.

And, by the way, our assistance is not just limited to NSX. We have tools to help migrate legacy load balancers such as F5 and Citrix to Avi. Simply leverage our simple, robust migration tools to move from your legacy load balancers to Avi. 

Avi Everywhere

Providing consistent automation and application delivery services from end-to-end can only be done in software. Because Avi is delivered entirely in software, it brings together programmability, agility, and flexibility to enable organizations like yours to future proof your infrastructure by extending the same application services seamlessly to cloud-native and containerized applications. Avi provides the same integration on native public clouds, bare metal, vCenter alone without NSX, OpenStack, and of course NSX.

Therefore, even if you are not an NSX customer, Avi is your load balancer of choice. Like Switzerland, Avi offers the same experience everywhere. It’s the easy button for connecting and protecting workloads for your business, developers, and so on.

Deploy Avi on ANY platform for ANY app — and then take your workloads with you to ANY platform, and to ANY app, without changing the operational model. Whatever workflows you have built — events, alerts, etc. — are available everywhere. Bring your workloads into the Avi platform once and use them for life.

Start your migration journey to Avi today!