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Building 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 optimisation technologies, while realising the added efficiency of a VXLAN-based network.

VXLAN provides a way for organisations to decouple virtual domains from the underlying networking and virtualization 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 maximized scalability and flexibility, as well as optimised performance for users, regardless of location.

With BIG-IP solutions as the bridge, organisations will be able to extend their existing networks and transition from using VLAN to using VXLAN-based topologies. This allows for controlled, gradual migrations of resources and systems, helping customers be confident that adopting VXLAN will serve their needs. It will also enable applications running in a VLAN environment to expand into a VXLAN network for added flexibility as needed.

F5’s BIG-IP platform can serve as a networking gateway for all ADN services, making them available to application workloads irrespective of the underlying network topology. For example, BIG-IP products can provide services in a unified, predictable manner for applications running across heterogeneous cloud environments that use different protocols. In addition, F5 can provide security, acceleration, and optimisation capabilities to complement SDN technologies and intelligently deploy services effectively throughout the IT infrastructure—for any workload, on any server, anywhere.

Because VXLAN-based networks are functionally isolated from one another, the IP addresses of virtual machines do not need to change when they are migrated between data centers or clouds. This drastically improves application mobility for disaster recovery, business continuity, and scalability scenarios. With VMware and F5, joint customers can retain the valuable ADN services their users depend on, even as virtual machines are moved or reprovisioned.

Availability

Currently, F5’s BIG-IP solutions can natively support VXLAN functionality. Virtual tunneling endpoint capabilities for VXLAN will be available in BIG-IP solutions during the first half of calendar year 2013.