Application Delivery Provisioning in the Virtual DC – What is it and Who Needs it?

Have you ever wondered how much time and effort it takes you to configure your application delivery controller (ADC) whenever you need to provide application delivery services to a new rolled out application? You need to get the configuration correct, then do the pre-testing, then the actual production deployment…and this cycle happens even if you only added a new server to your application to support more users.

This becomes even worse in a virtualized server environment, where adding a new VM to an application is simple and fast, and where virtualized applications can actually move around the virtualized data center or cloud – but what about ensuring your ADC fabric is aware of all of it?

The solution for this is actually not that hard, if you think about the fact that management systems for the provisioning of VMs are usually native to any organizations using server virtualization technologies, whether it’s systems developed by the virtualization vendors such as VMware’s vCenter, vCenter Orchestrator, vCloud Director, or vendors like IBM with their Tivoli product suite. Then all that is required in order to close the provisioning loop with the ADC is to integrate your ADC fabric with such systems.

Such integrations are usually done either through plug-ins which are installed in the management system and communicates with the ADC fabric or ADC fabric management system; or using SDKs and API which allow the management system to communicate directly with the ADCs.

By integrating an ADC fabric with the data center management or orchestration system, IT can now automate the process of provisioning an application including application delivery services, this guarantees that whenever a new application or service is provisioned an ADC is also provisioned and configured to ensure correct application delivery of the new application/service. The ADC provisioning and configuration can be done using templates or predefined scripts.

Another benefit which is provided by such integrations, ties strongly into virtualized environments where VMs may move around within the virtualized data center or cloud, in such a case it is imperative that the ADC fabric is aware an application is moved and is updated accordingly. Such updates may include moving the ADC once an application is moved (in case the ADC is a virtualized ADC) or migrating the ADC’s configuration from one ADC to another ADC within the whole ADC fabric.

So as you can see there are various use cases in which integrating the ADC infrastructure with the data center (and especially virtual data center) management systems can be very beneficial.

If you want to read more on how to integrate Radware ADCs with the virtualized data center and cloud environment, check out our web site.

Regards,

Eitan