WHITE PAPER: June 2025

Plug-and-Play Load Balancing for

VMware Cloud Foundation with

VMware Avi™ Load Balancer

Plug-and-Play Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Avi Load Balancer

Executive Summary ... 3
Why Load Balancing is Critical for VCF ... 4
Every Application Needs Load Balancing ... 4
Avi Enables the Cloud Operating Model ... 4
Avi Makes VCF Deployment Better ... 4
Enterprise Scale and Resiliency ... 4
Cloud Experience for DevOps ... 4
Comprehensive Web App Security ... 5
IDC Business Value Study of Avi ... 5
Avi and VCF Use Cases ... 5
Integrated Experience with Full Visibility for VCF ... 5
Disaster Recovery across Multiple Sites with GSLB ... 6
Web Application Security for VCF with WAF ... 6
Container Ingress with Integrated Security ... 6
vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) ... 6
Avi and VCF Integration Advantages ... 7
One Platform vs. Disjointed Point Products ... 7
Controller vs. Instance Manager ... 7
Decision Automation vs. Task Scripting ... 7
Optimal Resource Utilization vs. Over-provisioning ... 7
Built-in Analytics vs. Bolt-on Solutions ... 7
Avi and VCF Integration Details: Plug and Play Throughout Application Lifecycle ... 7
Build and Operate through VCF Operations Integration ... 8
Consume Avi Load Balancing with VCF Automation ... 9
Protect VCF Workloads Against Web Attacks with Avi Web Application and API Security ... 10
Summary ... 11

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) simplifies self-service private cloud with a consistent operating, governance, and consumption model. It provides quick time to value by enabling self-service consumption and delivery of private cloud resources, providing users and developers with a unified and consistent self-service layer. VCF customers can take advantage of the self-service private cloud with solutions to enable use cases and help drive increased business and IT agility, productivity, and efficiency.

VMware Avi Load Balancer

For those who have realized the value of VCF, why not extend the same principles you have come to believe into application delivery? With its genesis in the software-defined principles and backed by VMware’s validated designs, guided by simplified operations, self-service automation, holistic visibility, and overarching security that complements the network security, VMware Avi Load Balancer (Avi) offers a superior plug and play load balancing solution like none other.

Executive Summary

Plug-and-Play Load Balancing with a Cloud Operating Model

Businesses today are under immense pressure to deliver applications rapidly, driving a fundamental shift in how IT infrastructure and operations are designed and managed. Adoption of the cloud operating model—a framework that brings agility, self-service, automation, and elasticity to all environments is the foundation of this transformation.

Infrastructure platforms have rapidly evolved too: from the hardware-defined era to the software-defined cloud era and now accelerating into an AI-defined era. This latest phase is propelled by the rise of AI applications, including agentic workloads, which demand intelligent, scalable, and highly automated infrastructure solutions.

As business needs change, not all workloads can be handled the same way. Compliance requirements, integration complexities, and cost considerations often dictate the choice of the environment. Yet, users and developers expect a seamless, on-demand experience regardless of where their workloads reside. The cloud operating model addresses this by abstracting underlying services and enabling resource delivery through self-service portals or APIs, while IT maintains control, compliance, and optimal use of the infrastructure.

Traditional IT operational models are no longer sufficient to meet these evolving demands. To stay competitive, IT organizations must embrace:

Self-service access to resources, available anytime and anywhere
Elastic scalability, including auto-scaling and auto-healing capabilities
Consumption-based resource management for cost efficiency
Automated lifecycle management to streamline operations

Successfully adopting the cloud operating model also requires a shift in organizational mindset. IT teams need to become more customer-centric, develop multidisciplinary skills, and collaborate across functions to deliver value quickly and efficiently.

Foundational services such as load balancing must also evolve. Modern load balancing solutions are designed to accelerate resource consumption via automation, provide elasticity to handle dynamic workloads, and utilize application latency analytics for rapid issue detection and resolution—ensuring optimal performance, especially for AI-driven and next-generation applications.

By fully embracing the cloud operating model, IT organizations can deliver resources at the speed of business, enabling rapid application development and deployment while maintaining robust control and operational excellence. This strategic evolution is essential for organizations aiming to succeed in the AI-defined era.

Why Load Balancing is Critical for VCF

Every Application Needs Load Balancing. Enterprises are facing an unprecedented need to provide infrastructure that matches the agility of ever-changing applications. The network team is constantly pressured to support a much higher velocity of changes and updates to meet time-to-market considerations. Delivering great application experience is synonymous with business growth, better customer satisfaction, and workforce productivity. Organizations are realizing the need for a modern, software-defined load-balancing solution to enable a better application experience. Load balancing is a fundamental computing, storage, and network building block. Without load balancing, one cannot realize the true value of applications and digital transformation and deliver applications that business need to succeed.

Avi Enables the Cloud Operating Model

VMware Avi Load Balancer (Avi) is designed to provide flexible deployment and simplified operations through automation and centralized management to support the Cloud Operating Model strategy. Avi decouples the control plane from the data plane with a software-defined approach to application delivery infrastructure. It provides consistent application delivery services across clouds and heterogeneous infrastructure, including bare metal servers, virtual machines (VMs), and containers. Unlike legacy load balancers, which are highly overprovisioned and wasteful, Avi enables optimal capacity management and highly elastic fabric through automatic zero-touch autoscaling features. Yet another disadvantage of the legacy load balancers is the inability to troubleshoot issues in time, often resulting in friction between the application and the network teams. Avi makes it easy to troubleshoot complex problems through rich and contextual analytics and stops the blame game. By completely integrating with the VCF ecosystem, you can enjoy the benefits of unified automation workflows, validated designs, and visibility for complete peace of mind, knowing your applications will be delivered as intended.

Avi Makes VCF Deployment Better

Customers continue to extract tremendous value from the VCF solution, keeping in line with the principles of the cloud operating model. However, the last-mile challenges with application delivery remain. These are compounded by geographically disparate data centers with broader attack surfaces and reduced analytics and visibility. This is where Avi adds tremendous value to the existing VCF customers. The solution provides plug-and-play integration with VCF to deliver load balancing at the speed of applications. Customers can leverage built-in automation to deploy load balancing as code as part of DevOps workflows for rapid infrastructure roll-out. In addition to excellent server load balancing capabilities, Avi enables Global Server Load Balancing with Intelligent Traffic distribution across Data centers and easily addresses essential use cases such as Disaster Recovery. With the inbuilt WAF, Avi can even provide application protection before traffic reaches the network. Lastly, it proactively analyzes and optimizes the end-to-end application experience while simplifying troubleshooting and automatically building a self-healing infrastructure.

Here are a few ways Avi makes VCF investments better:

Enterprise Scale and Resiliency: As the mandate for application modernization takes effect, it becomes increasingly necessary to load balance applications across geographies and clouds for high availability and address critical issues such as disaster recovery and application upkeep. Avi provides global server load balancing (GSLB) services, which provide load balancing of applications across multiple geographically dispersed locations while providing centralized GSLB configuration, application monitoring, and analytics.
Cloud Experience for DevOps: Avi improves the cloud experience for DevOps in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) by providing a software-defined, plug- and-play load balancing solution that streamlines deployment and operations across traditional and modern workloads.
Comprehensive Web App Security: In recent years, web application security has become increasingly important, especially as web application attacks are the most common reason for breaches.

IDC Business Value Study of Avi

IDC interviewed organizations using the Avi to deploy application services to understand how they are using the platform to support their business operations. IDC’s whitepaper results show that study participants are achieving significant business value. Learn how Avi helps enterprises achieve:

43% lower cost of operations
90% faster to scale capacity
Top-Line Impact $13.6 million average higher revenue per year
Lower Cost of Operations
6-month payback
54% fewer outages

Integrated Experience with Full Visibility for VCF

Customers demand better application experience round the clock with complete end-to-end analytics and automation from Layer 2 through 7. This requires full-stack integration with VCF and the backing of rigorously tested, validated, and supported deployment designs.

Avi and VCF Use Cases

"The most significant benefits for us of using VMware Avi Load Balancer are the visibility, the reduction of the costs, and the scaling on demand."

Disaster Recovery across Multiple Sites with GSLB

Enterprise workloads are often mission-critical, demanding rigorous business continuity plans and application resilience. However, DR plans can be quite expensive with a standby site that is always idle. This translates to double the licensing cost and complex testing required to ensure this high-availability and failover process works in times of emergency. Avi’s software-defined architecture and on-demand auto-scaling of capacity dramatically simplifies the DR solution.

Web Application Security for VCF with WAF

Security is only as good as its weakest point. With VCF Networking by NSX offering complete network security from L2-L3. Avi WAF enhances the protection for your workloads.

Container Ingress with Integrated Security

Container security with Avi ensures robust protection for modern, containerized applications while delivering high-performance traffic management.

vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)

VKS is enterprise-grade, CNCF certified and conformant Kubernetes runtime, which is available with VCF.

Avi and VCF Integration Advantages

Unlike the legacy load balancers that are either hardware-based or derivatives of the hardware-based solutions, Avi’s software-defined load balancer brings elastic scale, robust performance, and intelligent analytics to every data center and cloud.

Avi and VCF Integration Details: Plug and Play Throughout Application Lifecycle

Avi delivers a true plug-and-play experience for VCF by tightly integrating with VCF Operations automating the deployment and lifecycle management of load-balancing infrastructure.