HAProxy Community Edition vs. VMware NSX

It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.

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

• Low-Cost Load Balancer
• Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
• Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
• SSL Termination

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with

Incentivized

We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.

Incentivized

We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.

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

• Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
• Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.

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