VMworld US 2014
F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV) and VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) today announced interoperability between F5’s BIG-IQ® management platform and the VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform for rapid orchestration of layer 2–7 network and application services in the software-defined data center (SDDC). Today’s announcement focuses on enabling customers to combine the VMware NSX platform’s network service automation with F5’s application delivery service management. This marks the latest in a series of collaborative efforts between the companies to bring compelling IT benefits to their mutual data center customers.
Typically, provisioning services for new applications—or changing parameters no matter how slightly for deployed applications—is a long, manual process. With a combined F5 and VMware solution, customers will be able to leverage the full suite of BIG-IP® services directly from within the NSX Manager as part of the normal virtual machine deployment process, enabling them to reduce provisioning time from days to minutes.
The F5 and VMware NSX technologies interoperate with management plane-level REST-based APIs that are used by F5 BIG-IP to register and deploy application services that can be consumed by F5 users in their software-defined data center. The NSX traffic steering capability enables traffic to be redirected to the F5 service. This combination allows F5 iApps® to be leveraged by NSX, and to be consumed as vendor templates that F5 customers can instantiate with application-specific parameters.
With F5 and VMware products, customers will be able to automate the deployment of policy-driven services for multi-tiered applications in their software-defined data center. The solution will be able to be deployed non-disruptively, enabling customers to leverage BIG-IP and BIG-IQ features in NSX virtual environments. Users will also be able to continue to use their custom iApps templates through native F5 interfaces.
KEY BENEFITS
- Simplified Management – Customers will be able to take full advantage of F5’s broad range of application services without management complexity. NSX provides operational agility for application-specific (rich layer 7 protocol) services for acceleration, availability, and security. The integration will provide customers with greater control over how services are holistically applied, along with unified services across L2–3 networking fabric and L4–7 application delivery fabric.
- Scalable Services and Automation – A consistent consumption model and API-based integration will enable customers to set and configure polices for acceleration, security, availability, and virtualization services for data center and cloud deployments. The joint solution will give IT teams the ability to automate the way VMware and F5 systems perform and respond to changing conditions, without disrupting production infrastructure or impacting revenue-generating business applications.
- Smooth Application Rollouts – By combining the strengths of each vendor’s approach, organizations will be positioned to maximize network and application performance with Software-Defined Application Services™. Integrated capabilities extend the utility of F5 iApps templates, providing prescriptive guidance to optimize popular applications and additional deployment scenarios.
AVAILABILITY
VMware NSX 6.1 and BIG-IQ 4.4 will both be available during the third quarter of calendar year 2014.