At MMS 2012, I met with Brocade’s Sue Hartford about her company’s ADX Load Balancer Provider for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012, which provides real-time provisioning and elastic application delivery for cloud-optimized environments.
According to Hartford, Brocade understands the need for automation and simplified management in cloud environments. The Brocade ADX Load Balancer Provider offers seamless integration between the Brocade ServerIron ADX Series of application delivery switches and Microsoft SCVMM 2012 to enable provisioning of both application and network resources.
A key characteristic of cloud computing is on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources such as applications and services. As organizations migrate their applications to a cloud infrastructure, they need a way to effectively provision the required compute and network resources to meet dynamic application demands. Traditional resource-provisioning methods, however, cannot provide the elasticity, automated real-time provisioning, and on-demand resource sharing required by today’s highly virtualized environments.
Organizations therefore need a new class of application delivery solutions that can efficiently manage application resources, automatically provision service requests, and offer the highest application performance and service levels for users in a cost-efficient manner. And according to Hartman, Brocade is really in the top tier as far as price/performance.
This integrated solution enables load balancing services to be included in the workflow for application service deployments via SCVMM, helping to streamline operations in the cloud environment and address growing application demands. The Brocade ADX Load Balancer Provider for Microsoft SCVMM 2012 is a software plug-in that enables SCVMM to natively provision and manage the Brocade ADX while making efficient use of the existing network infrastructure.
Once the Brocade ADX Load Balancer Provider plug-in is installed in SCVMM, IT administrators can
- Incorporate load balancing services as part of an SCVMM application service template within a private cloud
- Assign these load balancing services to the appropriate application service deployments
- Test network connectivity and Brocade ADX Load Balancer Provider interfaces before VM resources go into production
- Automatically configure the Brocade ADX Load Balancer Provider plug-in to provide load balancing to specific VMs upon their deployment
SCVMM is part of the comprehensive Microsoft System Center family of data center management products, which allow administrators to deploy, monitor, and manage the infrastructure at a macro level. The integrated Brocade and Microsoft solution enables a more agile application infrastructure, provides increased business responsiveness, and optimizes the use of existing application and network resources. Furthermore, it provides visibility across the entire network and VM infrastructure to address varying application traffic demands in a cloud environment.
For more information, check out the Brocade ADX product line here.
