Getting Started With NSX ALB: Part-1- Introduction & Architecture

Manish Jha

NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly Avi Vantage) is a multi-cloud software-defined load balancer that provides scalable application delivery across any infrastructure. NSX ALB is 100% software-defined and provides:

  • Multi-cloud: Consistent experience across on-premises and cloud environments through central management and orchestration.
  • Intelligence: Built-in analytics drive actionable insights that make autoscaling seamless, automation intelligent, and decision making easy.
  • Automation: 100% RESTful APIs enable self-service provisioning and integration into the CI/CD pipeline for application delivery.

Note: The NSX ALB solution came through VMware’s acquisition of Avi Networks in 2019.

Some of the key features of NSX ALB are:

  • Autoscaling of Load Balancers and Applications.
  • Web Application Analytics & Performance Insights.
  • Automation for IT, self-service for developers.

To know more about these features, please visit Avi Networks website. 

NSX ALB Architecture

NSX-ALB consists of two main components:

  • Avi Controller.
  • Service Engines (SE).

Controllers are deployed by the platform administrator, and service engines are automatically deployed by the controller when we create virtual services. Avi Controllers form the control plane, and the Service Engine forms the data plane.

The diagram shows the high-level architecture of NSX ALB.

Control Plane: Avi Controller is the central repository for the configurations and policies and can be deployed in both on-prem environments and in the cloud.

For lab/Poc purposes, one controller node suffices, but in production environments, a 3-node cluster is recommended. Avi Controller runs on a VM and can be managed using its web interface, CLI, or REST API.

Controller Responsibilities:

  • All platform-related configuration is done on controllers.
  • The controller stores and manages all policies related to services and management.
  • Controllers are also responsible for deploying SEs and placing virtual services on SEs to load balance new applications or increase the capacity of running applications.

Data Plane: The Service Engines (SEs) are lightweight data plane engines that handle all data plane operations by receiving and executing instructions from the controller.

Service Engine Responsibilities:

  • The SEs perform load balancing and all client- and server-facing network interactions.
  • It collects real-time application telemetry from application traffic flows.
  • Execute data plane application delivery control operations, such as health monitoring, and test the performance of the back-end servers.
  • Protects against security threats (DoS, suspicious client IPs).
  • Delivers high-performance web security with iWAF and offloads SSL decryption from back-end servers.

NSX ALB can be deployed in multiple cloud environments like VMware vCenter, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, VMC on AWS, Nutanix, OpenStack, or bare metal.

NSX ALB Use Cases

A few use cases that are attracting customers towards NSX ALB adoption are:

  • Load Balancer refresh.
  • Multi-cloud initiatives.
  • Security, including WAF and DDoS attack mitigation, achieves compliance (GDPR, PCI, HIPAA).
  • Container ingress integrates via REST APIs with K8S ecosystems like GKE, PKS, OpenShift, EKS, AKS, and TKG.

And that concludes this post. In the next post of this series, I will demonstrate NSX ALB deployment & configuration.

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