VMware® Avi™ Load Balancer (formerly known as NSX Advanced Load Balancer) allows you to implement centrally-managed distributed load balancing for your application workloads within VMware Cloud Foundation and configure enterprise grade load-balancing, global server load balancing, application security, and container ingress services.

Starting with VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2, you can use SDDC Manager to deploy Avi Load Balancer as a high availability cluster of three VMware ® Avi™ Controller instances, each running on a separate VM.
Note: Previous version of VMware Cloud Foundation support Avi Load Balancer, but do not deploy or manage the Avi Controller Cluster.

The Avi Controller cluster functions as the control plane and stores and manages all policies related to services and management. All Avi Controllers are deployed in the management domain, even when the Avi Load Balancer is deployed in a VI workload domain.

When you deploy Avi Load Balancer in a workload domain, it is associated with the workload domain's NSX Manager.
Note: VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 does not support deploying Avi Load Balancer on a workload domain that shares its NSX Manager with another workload domain.

VMware Cloud Foundation does not deploy or manage the Service Engine VMs (SEs) that function as the data plane. After deploying the Avi Controller cluster, you can use the Avi Load Balancer UI/API, VMware Aria Automation, or Avi Kubernetes Operator to deploy virtual services for an application, which creates the required Service Engine virtual machines. Service Engines (SEs) are deployed in the workload domain in which the Avi Load Balancer is providing load balancing services. All SEs deployed in a VI workload domain are managed by the Avi Controller that is part of the Avi Load Balancer deployment that is associated with the corresponding NSX instance managing the VI workload domain.

Other important considerations:
  • VMware Cloud Foundation does not manage license updates for Avi Load Balancer.
  • VMware Cloud Foundation does not manage backing up of Avi Load Balancer configuration database. See the VMware Avi Load Balancer Documentation for information about configuring scheduled and on-demand backups.
  • VMware Cloud Foundation does not manage upgrading Avi Controller Cluster. See the VMware Avi Load Balancer Documentation for information about upgrading.
  • The lifecycle of the Avi Service Engines is managed by each Avi Controller Cluster. You perform updates and upgrades in the Avi Load Balancer web interface, which has checks in place to ensure that you can only upgrade to supported versions.
  • If you upgraded from an earlier version of VMware Cloud Foundation and had deployed Avi Load Balancer, SDDC Manager will not be aware of or manage that Avi Load Balancer. You can use SDDC Manager to deploy additional Avi Load Balancers in such an environment.
  • In order to use Avi Load Balancer for load balancing services in a vSphere IaaS Control Plane environment, the Avi Load Balancer must be registered with the NSX Manager. See Registering an Avi Load Balancer cluster with an NSX Manager instance.
For more information about how to use and manage Avi Load Balancer see:

Limitations of Avi Load Balancer in VMware Cloud Foundation

Avi Load Balancer is not supported with the following functionality:

  • Management appliances, such as VMware Aria Suite
  • Workload domains with a shared NSX Manager instance