Azure Application Gateway vs. VMware NSX

For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.

Incentivized

With proper design, VMware NSX can and should be deployed to virtually any VMware virtualization environment, but the deployment should be tailored to the needs of that environment. There isn't really a one size fits all deployment design for all environments. That versatility is what provides its greatest strength to a business.

Incentivized

• Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
• With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.

Incentivized

• End to end encryption on the wire.
• Micro-segmentation.
• Integrates well with existing VMWare environment.
• Integrates well with our existing network.

Incentivized

• Live examples in the Azure documentation
• Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined
• Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Incentivized

• Interoperability in multi-vendor environments
• Advanced networking and packet acceleration options can be improved

Incentivized

I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

Incentivized

Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.

Incentivized

We use both Cisco ACI and VMware NSX, and while they have different strengths and capabilities, I would recommend VMware NSX, as it can be used in all VMware environments, without costly physical infrastructure changes. Cisco ACI provides some of the same capabilities, but not all. It's focus relies on physical networking changes.

Incentivized

• Positive : Improved performance and scalability
• Positive : Better and enhanced Security
• Positive : Efficiency
• Negative: Cost
• Negative: More resources to manage.

Incentivized

• Ability to move workloads more easily with the ability to stretch/move networks across multiple physical locations.
• The added flexibility allows you to expedite tech refreshes since you're no longer constrained by the hardware.

Incentivized