We’ve been using the Kemp Loadmasters for many years now and they have served us very well. You might know that Microsoft Azure has a partnership with Kemp technologies to provide full featured load balancing in your public & hybrid cloud solutions. I pretty happy with that as when talk about load balancing with Microsoft we always end up discussing the need for more features and layer 7 support. I sometimes jokingly tease them that this is due to their Windows NLB legacy. While I have done some magic with that, it is way too limited for today’s (and yesterdays) demands and needs. Also the hacks they use to get it to work can’t be used in network virtualization. In the cloud Microsoft has the Azure Load Balancer. Whilst nice when combined with availability sets many of the current workloads need more. That’s exactly what the KEMP Virtual LoadMaster for Azure delivers in their partnership with Microsoft:
- Layer 4, Layer 7 Load Balancing
- Layer 7 (or Cookie) Persistence
- SSL Offload/SSL Acceleration
- Application Health Checking
- Adaptive (Server Resource) Load Balancing
- Layer 7 Content Switching
- Application Acceleration: HTTP Caching, Compression & IPS
To me (and many other IT Pros) Kemp is the company that opened load balancing up to everyone on this planet with budget friendly but high value solutions. They took away the barrier to better & more capable load balancing for the masses. Furthermore they keep improving and I have seen many existing customers, including me get ever more benefits with the newer firmware releases, even on their entry level, older models like the LM2200 that are not for sale anymore. So you can keep using them or move them to the lab. They have great support and respond very quickly to vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Shellshock and Poodle.
Another benefit of this partnership is that we can use the load balancing solution we know and trust in all our environments: on premises (physical or virtual appliance), in the cloud & at our hosting companies. Partner ships with OEMs ensure that you can use the hardware you prefer (the DELL R320 is a nice example) and their Virtual Load Master now even extends into the cloud. So our options are to …
… deploy an appliance …
… virtualize the LoadMasters …
… leverage Kemp in the cloud
…. or select your own preferred OEM …
They cover all our bases with that line up and it helps with operational ease & efficiencies.
As I’m investigating some scenarios with KEMP LoadMasters in a Hyper-V environment (on premises, multi sites, Azure IAAS & Multifactor Authentication you can expect to see some blog posts on this. Some of these will leverage technologies available in Windows Server vNext (Technical Preview). Lot’s of very interesting ideas to support high availability & flexibility that are affordable and not just point solutions.
Ah the joy of being in virtualization is that one gets great exposure to storage, networking, cloud solutions and on premises. The experience & knowledge of the entire stack isn’t just fun (yes working can be fun) but it is also what allows to build great solutions.