ITWire

The announcement was made by F5 at VMworld 2012 Europe, with F5’s SVP of Business Development, Jim Ritchings, giving details of how the company’s BIG-IP products can now natively take advantage of the benefits of VXLAN in the latest VMware environments, based on VMwarevSphere and vCloud Director.

F5 also announced its intention to add VXLAN virtual tunneling endpoint capabilities to its BIG-IP products, providing the ability to natively encapsulate and decapsulate VXLAN packets. “This innovation will further enable organisations to reliably scale cloud environments and streamline operations,” Ritchings said.

According to Ritchings, these latest announcements build on F5’s partnership with VMware, including recently announced participation in the VMware Ready for Networking and Security Program. “These collaborative technology efforts help joint customers realise additional value by deploying the companies’ solutions in concert. Organisations can select either physical BIG-IP devices or BIG-IP virtual editions to leverage the full suite of F5’s ADN services, such as security, acceleration and optimization technologies, while realising the added efficiency of a VXLAN-based network.”

Ritchings also said that F5 solutions occupied “strategic points of control in the network,” putting F5 in a “great position to collaborate with VMware in optimising customers’ virtualisation and cloud infrastructures.”

“The BIG-IP platform serves as an ideal gateway to help organisations achieve the full benefits of F5’s ADN services in their SDN deployments. To further this aim, F5 will continue to enhance its BIG-IP virtual editions in the coming months by increasing current throughput performance levels by up to 200 per cent. With this announcement and F5’s ongoing investments in innovation underscore our commitment to customers’ cloud initiatives with VMware,” Ritchings emphasised.

Ritchings said that VXLAN provided a way for organisations to decouple virtual domains from the underlying networking and virtualisation infrastructure, enhancing overall system flexibility, scalability, and resilience.

“With VXLAN, customers can create isolated multi-tenant broadcast domains across the existing data center fabric. This approach enables organisations to create elastic, logical networks that span physical network boundaries to better serve geographically dispersed systems. It overcomes the traditional limitations of VLAN-based topologies for maximised scalability and flexibility, as well as optimised performance for users, regardless of location.”