VMware and F5 Networks

The virtual future is here.

Since 1998, VMware, one of the fastest-growing public software companies, has offered a range of comprehensive solutions that help organizations optimize and manage their IT infrastructure from the data center to the desktop. VMware products help customers tame sprawling server environments, streamline software development, and ensure that critical applications and services are always available. In today's business environments, this means 24/7.

VMware does this through virtualization, a technology that aggressively challenges the physical constraints of traditional data center architectures such as the one-operating-system or one-application-per-server ratio. As a general concept, virtualization decouples a logical software entity from the physical hardware on which it runs. In the case of VMware, server virtualization enables IT departments to host multiple virtual machines (running operating systems, enterprise applications, and more) on a single device. Virtualization also provides the capability to move operating systems, applications, and data among virtual servers and physical servers--automatically, in response to fluctuating user loads or rapidly expanding data stores. With this newfound agility, IT departments stretch their hardware dollars further because they minimize wasted server and storage space.

"F5 ensures that [network and storage infrastructure] can handle whatever is thrown at it, but also maximize agility of virtual application infrastructure."

Phil de la Motte Senior Business Development Manager, F5 Networks

"But in preparation to adopt a virtualization strategy, IT departments must ask, 'Is my network and storage infrastructure ready to support virtualization?' After making a large investment in your virtualization environment both in cost and management resources you need to make sure that your servers are available, you have access to your data, and you're getting the most out of your investment," says Phil de la Motte, Senior Business Development Manager at F5 Networks. "Just as in traditional server environments, in the virtualized environment, products from F5 help you ensure the full potential of your virtual solution, enabling your network to adapt to unexpected virtualization needs, ensure HA, maximize resources, and improve performance. The network and storage infrastructure makes a huge difference in how virtualized applications perform and F5 ensures that it can handle whatever is thrown at it, but also maximize agility of virtual application infrastructure."

For data center network infrastructures, F5 provides intelligent and automated load balancing to virtual machines. To assure the availability by offloading CPU-intensive tasks such as secure sockets layer (SSL) transactions, caching, or compression, F5 products lighten the load on a company's servers, freeing up valuable resources to boost availability and enhance application performance. F5's sophisticated compression technologies accelerate application performance--even on virtualized servers--as much as 3x, while reducing bandwidth utilization by up to 80 percent.

On the storage side, F5 intelligent file virtualization helps simplify storage management and build more flexible file storage infrastructures to respond to changing demands. By load balancing virtual machines among multiple storage devices, F5 products help to alleviate application performance bottlenecks at the storage layer and manage data growth. F5 dramatically simplifies the provisioning of storage for virtual machines to help companies react to unexpected storage growth associated with virtual server environments.

As a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program, F5 is taking advantage of VMware testing software and technical support to develop integrated solutions that will help companies realize the full benefits of running applications in a virtualized environment. F5 increases performance and availability for applications running on VMware, and helps companies maximize existing resources with the following products:

• BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
  Deployed with VMware ESX or VDI devices, BIG-IP LTM can load balance traffic to virtual servers or from virtual desktops. As a dedicated hardware device, BIG-IP LTM also offloads processing-intensive activities like SSL termination, caching, or compression, thus minimizing CPU and memory load on ESX virtual machines.
• BIG-IP WebAccelerator
  An advanced web application delivery solution, BIG-IP WebAccelerator is available as an add-on module for BIG-IP LTM. It optimizes and enhances performance of virtualized web applications for remote desktops accessing a VMware ESX device over a wide area network.
• BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM)
  When deployed in VMware environments involving multiple data centers, BIG-IP GTM intelligently directs traffic among virtual machines located at these dispersed data centers, for optimal availability.
• WANJet
  VMware enables administrators to copy virtual machine disk files over the WAN. WANJet devices accelerate the transfer of files and reduce bandwidth usage in VMware ESX deployments by compressing and caching sizable files.
• F5 ARX
  F5 products can quickly and easily provision new storage for VMware environments running on NFS, thus avoiding the need to pre-allocate large amounts of storage. F5 devices can also distribute virtual machine files across multiple physical NAS devices, ensuring that no single device gets overwhelmed by the I/O demands of the virtual server environment. Equally important, companies can virtualize their VMware infrastructure and general purpose data storage with a single solution, further driving the cost savings and ROI from non-disruptive data migrations, automated storage tiering, backup optimization, and efficient load-balancing.

F5 gives companies a complete virtualization solution and helps optimize the network and storage to maximize the value of your virtualization investment.

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By Anne Landfield, a freelance writer based in Seattle.

October 2008

Issue Articles

• Home
• Welcome from John McAdam
• VMware and F5
• Q&A with VMware
• Cover Story: One for the books
• Microsoft Virtualization Meets F5
• Virtual Data Center