Server and Application Virtualization
Managing the Complexity of Virtualization
According to analysts, organizations have virtualized on average almost one-quarter of their servers. Virtualization is a growing market with a potential market size of 20 billion USD by 2010, a 68% increase over five years (according to IDC 2009). Radware has created a set of tailored solutions specifically designed to answer the challenges customers face when deploying server or desktop application virtualization solutions. Radware’s solutions are designed to work in a fully virtualized environment as well as in heterogenic environments.
Ensuring Virtualized Application Delivery and Quality of Experience
Due to the nature of the virtual environment multiple applications are deployed on one physical host. While the benefits of this consolidation approach are obvious the challenges are not:
- In a virtual environment maintaining SLAs and improving the quality of experience (QoE) of end users becomes a much more complex task as hundreds or even thousands of different virtual machines (VMs) may share the same physical resource pool and therefore compete for the same resources.
- Mission-critical applications that have been migrated into the virtual environment still require the same strict zero-downtime policy as required before the migration. In a highly dynamic virtual environment where VMs can move between physical and dynamically allocated resources it is even more challenging to ensure 24x7 availability for these applications
Radware’s APSolute product suite integrates seamlessly into fully virtualized server environments or into heterogenic environments (i.e., a hybrid of dedicated and virtualized resources) to eliminate the challenges both pose for effective application delivery. The combined deployment of Radware products as a total solution also generates cost savings above those gained by server or application virtualization alone.
Radware’s integrated application delivery solution for virtualized server environments includes the following products:
- AppDirector: This intelligent application delivery controller (ADC) for the data center enables high availability, optimized application performance, application security, and infrastructure scalability. AppDirector provides application acceleration features, such as Web compression, secure socket layer (SSL) offloading, TCP optimization, and caching for the fastest application and transaction response times.
- VirtualDirector is an application delivery optimization solution for the virtualized data center. VirtualDirector provides real-time dynamic allocation of data center resources, based on QoE metrics and business events to ensure positive user experience and improved response time. The solution aligns virtual data center operations with business policies while optimizing the use of virtual as well as physical resources to further generate CAPEX and OPEX savings.
- Ensures availability of virtualized applications through advanced health monitoring and failure bypassing
- Improves end user quality of experience
- Provides application response time monitoring, acceleration and optimization
- Offers transparent scalability and investment protection
- Optimizes VM count; prevents VM sprawl
- Automates the virtual environment
Automatically Adapt the ADC to Virtual Infrastructure Configuration Changes
Virtualization creates a single, consolidated infrastructure that enables deploying multiple resources on-the-fly. As a result, adding or removing VMs dynamically becomes easy and painless. While provisioning a new server in the traditional physical environment typically takes up to several weeks, the same server operating in the virtual environment can be provisioned within a couple of minutes.
As the ADC solution guarantees the availability and performance of virtual applications, the network administrator must adapt the ADC's configuration with any configuration changes within the virtualization layer. These changes might include adding a new VM to a virtual application cluster, removing it from the application cluster, or provisioning a new critical application. Left unchecked, virtual application availability and performance could suffer significant degradation.
Radware’s vAdapter™ ensures that any change in the virtual infrastructure (VI) -- impacting the ADC configuration -- is automatically synchronized with the ADC in real-time without manual reconfiguration of the ADC or coding any complex scripts.
Using vAdapter, IT administrators can easily map a cluster of VMs that define a service in the virtual environment to its corresponding ADC configuration. For instance, once a new VM is added to the virtual service cluster, vAdapter automatically reconfigures the ADC in real-time, so that the respective server is added to the service farm or group accordingly.
Key Benefits Include:
- Reduce OPEX through simplified operations
- Maximize productivity and increase service efficiency
- Increase business agility while reducing risk
Preventing Virtual Desktop User Downtime
In a virtual desktop environment employee desktops run in the data center and not on the employee’s own PC. A thin presentation client running on each employee machine relies on an open connection in order to send commands and present the results back to the user. For that reason, a broken connection or a heavily congested link translates immediately into an employee’s inability to perform tasks as they are unable to efficiently use mission-critical or revenue-generating applications.
Even though different vendors offer link high-availability (HA) solutions to prevent broken connections, these solutions introduce seconds or even minutes of downtime during which open virtual desktop sessions are terminated and no new sessions can be opened. Radware’s application delivery solution provides virtual desktop applications with full availability and enhanced performance.
Radware’s integrated application delivery solution for virtualized desktop environments includes the following products:
- AppDirector: This intelligent application delivery controller (ADC) for the virtual desktop environment enables high availability for virtual desktop deployments, optimized performance and infrastructure scalability. AppDirector provides application acceleration features such as Web compression, secure socket layer (SSL) offloading and TCP optimization for the fastest application and transaction response times.
- LinkProof: is the industry leading multi‐WAN load balancing solution. LinkProof ensures data center connectivity to the Internet and Intranets through multiple ISPs and private lines to overcome connectivity loss. LinkProof enhances user experience and response time with its sophisticated proximity-based routing, smart link load balancing, end-to-end transaction path health monitoring, application‐based routing, and application bandwidth management. With its “add-link-as-you-grow” approach, LinkProof allows the addition of new Internet links on demand as the organization grows its business and number of users.
Key benefits of Radware’s desktop application virtualization solution:
- Prevents user "downtime" with 24x7 connectivity
- Maximizes the performance of Internet links to improve user experience
- Optimizes the network path for virtual desktop users through unique, advanced health monitoring and performance checks
- Provides 24x7 access for virtual desktop users by ensuring the virtual desktop management (VDM) application is fully available and better performing
- Improves VDM security server performance by offloading CPU-intensive SSL decryption from VDM secure servers to the network