While VMware has been making a lot of news in recent weeks, thanks in no small part to the disruption after it was acquired by Broadcom, the company is still building out new capabilities.

This week VMware by Broadcom announced that it is advancing its Avi Load Balancer technology with a set of new features to help organizations better scale and manage cloud workloads. VMware originally acquired Avi Networks in 2019, bringing the company's load balancer and network monitoring technologies into the VMware portfolio. The Avi Load Balancer is a software-defined load balancer technology that is targeted at hybrid cloud environments. The technology is well suited for private cloud environments including VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), Kubernetes workloads including VMware Tanzu, as well as mobile and 5G workloads.

“Avi integrates with Tanzu Kubernetes runtime and Tanzu Application Service (TAS, formerly Pivotal Foundry),” Umesh Mahajan, VP and GM of Broadcom's application, Networking, and Security business, told SDxCentral. “With the same architecture, Avi provides container ingress and built-in security for any Kubernetes environments including OpenShift.”

What's new in Avi Load Balancer The Avi Load Balancer update brings a slew of new updates.

For DevOps professionals there is a new self-service load balancing capability for VCF private clouds via integration with Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Operations). This feature allows DevOps teams to provision load balancing services on-demand.

For Kubernetes workloads there is now Gateway API support. Mahajan said that Gateway API support simplifies container ingress deployments and extends Avi’s analytics on a per-route basis. Prior to this update, he noted that administrators often had to rely on complicated workarounds such as Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinition (CRDs) and annotations.

[caption id="attachment_141893" align="alignnone" width="1238"] VMwares Avi Load Balanceru update is designed to offer a 3x increase on multitenancy to enable one team to manage more tenants. (Source: VMware by Broadcom)[/caption]

Boosting multitenancy and 5G performance Manageability for larger scale is another area of improvement. Mahajan said that the update has a 3x increase on multitenancy to enable the same team to manage more tenants. He noted that capability will be especially useful for managed service providers, mobile/telco customers, and large-scale enterprises that operate as an internal service provider.

Additionally, VMware has extended its software-defined approach to mobile and 5G applications.

Mahajan said that Avi Load Balancer now integrates with VMware Telco Cloud Platform and supports virtualized network function (VNF) (VNFs) and container network functions (CNFs). These enhancements cater to the unique requirements of telecom and mobile use cases, ensuring a flexible and consistent load balancing solution across on-premises and cloud environments.

Accelerating legacy load balancer migrations There are still a lot of hardware load balancers in use across hybrid deployments. It's an active area that VMware by Broadcom is looking to target.

To further simplify and accelerate migrations from legacy load balancer hardware appliances, VMware has introduced a new UI-based conversion tool. This tool automates the discovery of legacy load balancer configurations, converts them into Avi policies and features, and deploys them on the Avi platform.

Mahajan said that with built-in easy automation and application analytics as part of Avi Load Balancer, teams can simplify triaging. He also noted that DevOps teams can deploy load balancer capabilities as they are deploying apps.

“Directionally, Avi’s focus is on larger customer requirements to operationalize load balancers faster at scale and seamlessly integrate with VCF to be the load balancer of choice for customer’s VMs and Kubernetes workloads and enable deeper application analytics,” Mahajan said. “This will further enhance customers' need to deploy applications quickly and significantly improve team productivity.”