NSX Load Balancing – Accelerated Layer 4 Virtual Servers

In the previous blog, we investigated the basic feature set of NSX Load Balancing, some of the business reasons to use it, and deployed an ESG (Edge Services Gateway), the NSX load balancing platform.  Today, we are going to setup our first virtual server.  When we look at load balancing, it operates at the Transport layer or above of the OSI model and is inclusive of the network layer.  In the most basic of terms, Load Balancing looks at a “session” from the transport layer and applies a load balancing algorithm and a NAT policy to the traffic. I put “session” in quotes because we can load balance both TCP and UDP based applications, but UDP does not have a stateful session, but we can still load balance UDP services.

Whenever someone has stated that and given application cannot be load balanced, I first ask them if the traffic can be processed by a NAT at either the client or server end. If the answer is yes, odds are that it can be load balanced with sufficient understanding of the application and the required ports, protocols and persistence to make the application function correctly. This is Continue reading

Getting Started with NSX Load Balancing

In my conversations with customers and peers, load balancing is becoming an increasingly popular discussion.  Why you may ask?  Simple, load balancing is a critical component for most enterprise applications to provide both availability and scalability to the system.  Over the last decade we have moved from bare metal servers to virtual servers and from manual deployment of operating systems to using tools like Chef, Puppet, vRA or other custom workflows. In addition to the movement towards virtualization and the API being the new CLI, we are also seeing a movement to Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) where Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) such as routing, VPN, firewalls, and load balancing are moving to software. The value of automation, SDN, and NFV has been proven in the largest networks today and this migration to software has proven to have tremendous ROI. Many companies also want to leverage the same cost effective models.   To get us started, here are the most common questions:

1. Does NSX provide load balancing? Yes, NSX has a feature set that addresses the most common deployment requirements for load balancing in enterprises today.
2. Do you charge more for NSX Edge Load Balancing? No, NSX Load Continue reading