Dell and F5 Networks — Server Virtualization
For over 10 years, Dell and F5 Networks have worked together to solve business technology challenges. F5's technology, a critical component of the Dell™ enterprise solution portfolio, optimizes your server environment to help ensure the highest levels of application performance, security and availability.
Before you can confidently implement server virtualization, you have to be sure your network and storage infrastructure are ready to support it. You need to make sure that your servers will be available, that you'll have access to your data, and that you'll get the most out of your investment. F5® products can help by enabling your network to adapt to unexpected virtualization needs, ensuring high availability, maximizing resources and improving performance.
Load Balancing for Virtualized Servers
F5 provides intelligent and automated load balancing for virtual machines. By offloading CPU-intensive tasks such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions, caching and compression, F5 products lighten the load on your servers, freeing up valuable resources to boost availability and enhance application performance. F5's sophisticated compression technologies accelerate application performance — even on virtualized servers — by as much as three times, while reducing bandwidth utilization by up to 80 percent.
Using F5 products as part of your server virtualization solution offers:
- Increased application availability
F5 solutions automatically reroute traffic whenever virtual machines are unavailable, so you can maintain application availability throughout both virtual machine migrations and unplanned failures, even across multiple virtual data centers. - Increased return on investment (ROI)
By offloading functionality from virtual machines, F5 solutions help you free up server resources to achieve maximum utilization and consolidation. - A better user experience
F5 solutions load balance traffic between multiple virtual machines, whether they're on the same or different physical servers, so your users can get the best possible performance, regardless of the application, location or context.
F5 Products for Server Virtualization From Dell
F5 increases performance and availability for applications running on VMware® and helps you maximize existing resources with the following products:
- BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM)
Deployed with VMware ESX™ or VDI devices, BIG-IP LTM balances traffic loads to virtual servers or from virtual desktops. As a dedicated hardware device, BIG-IP LTM also off-loads processing-intensive activities such as SSL termination, caching and compression, minimizing CPU and memory load on ESX virtual machines. - BIG-IP WebAccelerator™
An advanced Web application delivery solution, BIG-IP WebAccelerator is available as an add-on module for BIG-IP LTM. It optimizes and enhances performance of virtualized Web applications for remote desktops accessing a VMware ESX device over a wide area network. - BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager™ (GTM)
When deployed in VMware environments involving multiple data centers, BIG-IP GTM intelligently directs traffic among virtual machines located at these dispersed data centers, for optimal availability. - F5 ARX®
F5 ARX products can:- Quickly and easily provision new storage for virtual environments running on Network File System (NFS), avoiding the need to preallocate large amounts of storage.
- Distribute virtual machine files across multiple physical network attached storage (NAS) devices, helping to ensure that no single device gets overwhelmed by the I/O (input/output) demands of the virtual server environment.
- Enable you to virtualize your infrastructure and general purpose data storage with a single solution, further driving cost savings and ROI from nondisruptive data migrations, automated storage tiering, backup optimization and efficient load balancing.
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