The document discusses a banking customer's migration from a legacy load balancer to Avi Networks. It describes the challenges the customer faced with the previous load balancer, including manual configuration processes that led to long wait times and incidents. It then summarizes the customer's experience migrating over 10,000 virtual services to Avi, which resulted in a 60% reduction in change-related incidents, bottom line savings of $2 million per year, and faster implementation times. The document also outlines VMware's professional services for migrations to Avi and the benefits those services provide.

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Our Panel Today
Chandra Sekar
Senior Director,
Product Marketing,
VMware NSBU
Matt Adam
Customer #1
Currently, Staff Solutions
Architect, VMware
Neptuno Moretto
Program Manager, Field
Engineering, VMware
Matt Karnowski
Customer #2
Currently, Group Product
Line Manager, VMware

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Challenges with previous load balancer
First experience with Avi
Migration concerns/considerations
No disruptive strategies for migration
Benefits realized after migration
Agenda

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200+ LTMs/GTMs Legacy F5 Infrastructure
500+ requests per month for load balancing modifications
• Add/remove pool member, change priority
• New LTM vip/GTM wip
• Most requests were completed manually using tmsh commands
Incidents from manual changes were common
4-6 month backlog of requests
Banking Customer - Background

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Manual load balancer configs, high volume of requests
Banking Customer - Challenges That We Needed to Solve
Trouble Tickets
Caused by Manual
Changes
Complex Load
Balancer
Configurations
Huge backlog took 6-8
weeks for app deployment
Manually provisioned all
load balancer configs
Miscommunications
created incident tickets
Miscommunication between
app & LB teams
What can be done?

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FinTech Customer – From Legacy LB to Modern Application Services
• Two physical appliances deployed in
Active/Standby HA
• Shared Control/Data plane on same hardware
• Control Plane resource limitations due to
sharing
• Event notifications : SNMP Traps and Syslog
• Metrics Gathering: SNMP Polling
• Manual Horizontal Scaling
• Service Impacts when Scaling
• Inflexible deployment, VIP tethered to physical
hardware
• Metrics rolled up to device level
• Troubleshooting requires obtaining Network
Operations resource
• Use cases requiring custom scripting; iRules
• Service Engine (software LB) pool dispersed amongst ESXi cluster
members, Active/Active
• Separated Control Data plane
• Independently scalable Control Plane with dedicated
resources
• Event notfications : SNMP Traps and Syslog
• Metrics Gathering: Rest API
• Automatic Horizontal and Vertical Scaling
• Zero Service Impact Scaling
• Flexible deployment, VIP is able to float and migrate between
Service Engines
• Advanced metrics and analytics down to the VIP level
• Analytics/Visibility allows for AppOps to be able to
troubleshoot without involving NetOps.
• Majority of iRule use cases are native configurations; VIP ACLs,
content switching, redirections
From – Legacy LB To – Avi

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Education Options Prior to Migration

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Education Options Prior to Migration

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Migration Process Life-Cycle
Automated config
conversion
 Select apps for migration
 Review existing LB configuration
 Identify config conversion strategy /
methodology
 Perform config conversion &
optionally import the same
 Onboard converted configuration
Customization
 Create complex application policies & profiles,
convert iRules / traffic manipulation rules &
perform other advanced configuration
customization like custom monitors, pool group
associations etc.
 Onboard additional or customized configuration
(Optional)
Validation and
functional testing
 Verify imported configuration
 Identify cutover & rollback strategies
 Verify health-monitor operations
 Perform application functional testing
Consulting Pre-Sales Project planning
and scheduling
 Kick off meeting
 Team identification
 Migration project plan
proposal & acceptance
 Infrastructure readiness
assessment
Cut-over/Go-Live
 Perform application traffic
cutover
 UAT and sign-off from
application owners &
other associated teams
 Release system to end
users
Pre-Sales Program governance
Migration
Cut-over/Go Live

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Migrate to Avi for server load
balancing
Migrate to Avi for global server
load balancing
Migrate
Migration
Design/Deploy Avi for server load
balancing
Design/Deploy Avi for global
server load balancing
Design & Deploy Avi
Day 0 & 1
Leverage NSX Advanced Load
Balancer for desktop virtualization
Leverage NSX Advanced Load
Balancer for global desktop
virtualization
Design and Deploy Avi for EUC
Leverage Avi for web application
firewall
Assess Avi health
Web App Firewall Health Check
Day 2
VMware Professional Services for Avi
Project Management

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Migration Experience and Best Practices
 Migrated 10,000 virtual services from the F5 LTMs to Avi via self-service offerings to the app owners.
 Reduction in the wait time for implementation from ~8 weeks to same day. Non-prod implementations
typically completed in under 10 minutes from customer submission.
 App owners started using the analytics/logs to troubleshoot their own issues, reducing incident
volumes.
 Define the support process early, who will handle an incident if automation breaks during a
migration?
 Document, document, document! An hour spent documenting the process to use the automation is
at least 10 hours saved answering user questions.

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The bank experienced:
• A 60% reduction in change-related incidents. All incidents caused by the automation were the
result of user error.
• Bottom line savings of roughly $2 million per year in labor costs related to load balancing
implementations. Some load balancer platform engineers were able to transfer to more
rewarding automation or architecture work.
• Reduction in the wait time for implementation from ~8 weeks to same day. Non-prod
implementations typically completed in under 10 minutes from customer submission.
• Happier users, happier management.
The Bank’s Success Story
1
3

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Complete spectrum of professional services in solution design, deployment & migrations
Avi Migration Services Benefits
Centralized Migration
Service
Simplified Conversion
Process
Proven at Global
Enterprises
• Seamless move to the next
generation application delivery
platform
• Migration tools and processes
leveraging automation simplifies
the configuration conversion
process
• Significant time and
cost savings
• Wealth of technical expertise
in delivery of migration projects
• Thousands of applications and
industry standard project
management methodologies
• Lowers business risk and
achieves timely completion

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