Avi Load Balancer is a software-based solution that provides real-time analytics and elastic application delivery services, including user-to-application timing, SSL termination, and load balancing. Installing it directly onto Linux servers leverages the raw horsepower of the underlying hardware without the overhead added by a virtualization layer.
It is recommended to disable hyper-threading (HT) in the BIOS of the Linux servers upon which Avi Load Balancer runs before installing it. It does not get changed often, but RHEL, OEL and CentOS may map physical and hyperthreaded cores differently. Rather than basing its decision on the behaviour or characteristics of a core, the load balancer has a predictive map of the host OS via which it skips or ignores hyperthreaded cores. When an OS gets upgraded, this map might change, which means you might be utilizing an HT core instead of a physical core, which will impact the performance.
Docker Container
The Avi Load Balancer Linux server cloud solution uses containerization provided by the Docker for support across operating systems and easy installation.
Docker local storage (default /var/lib/docker) should be at least 24 GB to run Avi Load Balancer containers.
Podman local storage (default /var/tmp) should be at least 24 GB to run Avi Load Balancer containers.
If the Avi Load Balancer SE is instantiated through the cloud UI, add 12 GB to run it.
For an upgrade request to a higher version on Podman, the storage requirement for the Controller is 24GB and for SE is 12GB which needs to be validated before starting the upgrade.
In the docker environment, Avi Load Balancer does not fiddle with the NTP. The host is supposed to have NTP in sync.
NTP server setting in the UI has no effect if the Controllers are docker containers and the host time is off.
There is no guidance if the host time will always prevail or if the UI setting should override the host when the Controllers are docker containers.
