The logical design provides a high-level overview of the solution design.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Formerly known as Avi Networks) provides multi-cloud load balancing, web application firewall, application analytics and container ingress services from the data center to the cloud. It is built on software-defined principles which separate the data plane from the control plane. The platform provides a centrally managed, dynamic pool of load balancing resources on commodity x86 servers, VMs or containers, to deliver granular services close to individual applications. This allows network services to scale near infinitely without the added complexity of managing hundreds of disparate appliances.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer can be configured in the following editions:
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise with Cloud Services Edition, which provides all features that NSX Advanced Load Balancer has to offer along with value added SaaS delivered Cloud Services (Available from NSX Advanced Load Balancer v21.1.3 or later).
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise Edition, which provides enterprise feature set that VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer has to offer including load balancer, GSLB, WAF, Container Ingress and more.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Basic Edition, which is a replacement edition for NSX LB with restricted features equivalent to NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
The platform is comprised of the following components:
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller
The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller, as its name implies, implements the control plane for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer. It is the single point of management and control that serves as the 'brain' for the solution and for high availability is typically deployed as a three-node cluster. In a VMware Cloud Foundation, NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controllers run as VMs in the management VI workload domain.
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Services
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Services enables value added operational capabilities to the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer deployments delivered through the Cloud Services Portal including Central Licensing, Live Security Threat Intelligence, Proactive Support and more.
This is available for VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer deployments running v21.1.3 or later.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Service Engine
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Service Engine implements the data plane for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer SEs perform load balancing for the configured applications.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Admin Console
The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Admin Console is a modern web-based user interface that provides role-based access to control, manage and monitor applications. Its capabilities are likewise available via the NSX Advanced Load Balancer CLI. All services provided by the platform are available as REST API calls to enable IT automation, developer self-service, and a variety of third-party integrations. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Admin Console is hosted by default on the Controller and can be accessed via the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller cluster FQDN/IP address.
Cloud Connectors
Cloud Connectors provide ecosystem integrations to enable automated life-cycle-management of the Service Engines and load-balanced applications that are configured on the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controllers. Automation includes deploying, configuring and scaling NSX Advanced Load Balancer Service Engines, placing load-balanced applications on the right set of the Service Engines and much more.
Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation solution will provide guidance to implement NSX-T Cloud Connector integration, which will enable automated life-cycle-management for load-balanced applications that will be deployed on the NSX Advanced Load Balancer in the VMware Cloud Foundation on NSX-T managed networks.
Load Balancing Architecture for VMware Cloud Foundation
NSX Advanced Load Balancer will leverage the NSX-T Cloud Connector integration to provide fully automated load-balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation. NSX Advanced Load Balancer components are mapped to the specific workload domains.
Each NSX-T Data Center deployment managing virtual infrastructure (VI) workload domains will require an independent NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller cluster to be deployed. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller cluster will manage the Service Engines which will be deployed in the VI workload domains that the NSX-T Data Center manages and will provide load balancing services. Multiple NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller clusters within a single VMware Cloud Foundation stack might be created in case of multiple NSX-T Data Center instances are used to manage the VI workload domains.
