NSX Advanced Load Balancer is built on software-defined principles, enabling a next-generation architecture to deliver the flexibility and simplicity expected by IT and lines of businesses.

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer architecture separates the data and control planes to deliver application services beyond load balancing, such as application analytics, predictive autoscaling, micro-segmentation, and self-service for application owners in on-premises or cloud environments.

The platform provides a centrally managed, dynamic pool of load balancing resources on commodity x86 servers, Virtual Machines (VMs), or containers, to deliver granular services close to individual applications. This allows network services to scale up without the added complexity of managing hundreds of disparate appliances.

Figure 1.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides out-of-the-box integrations for on-premises or cloud deployments. These integrations with private cloud frameworks, software-defined network (SDN) controllers, container orchestration platforms, virtualized environments, and public clouds enable turnkey application services and automation.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrates with the following ecosystems:

  • Bare Metal (Linux Server Cloud)

  • No-Orchestrator Cloud

  • VMware vCenter

  • VMware NSX-T

  • OpenStack

  • Amazon Web Services

  • Microsoft Azure

  • Google Cloud Platform

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer consists of:

  • The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller or Controller cluster that functions as the control plane.

  • The Service Engines(SEs) that function as the data plane.