As we start off this New Year, how about including a resolution to improve application delivery? In Best Practices for Application Delivery in Virtualized Networks – Part I , we covered key application delivery challenges that have come up due to the complexities of managing the many types of applications that enterprises use today, and further complicated by data center consolidation and virtualization. We then covered some best practices, courtesy of Dr. Jim Metzler’s 2011 Application Service Delivery Handbook, which recommended taking a lifecycle approach to planning and managing application performance.
A key step to the lifecycle approach is to implement network and application optimization tools, such as WAN Optimization solutions and Application Delivery Controllers, including server load balancers. Of course, these solutions are not new to the market and already address many of the needs that exist with delivering enterprise applications in virtualized data centers -- namely, the need to ensure network reliability, availability and security for users accessing these applications. In this post, we will discuss a recent study by IDC, where IT decision makers across Europe and the US spoke out about their strategies for using server load balancers to deal with emerging challenges.
. What important attributes do you look for in your server load balancers?
The Cisco Global Certification Team (GCT) is proud to announce the completion of USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2 certifications for the following Cisco products:
4500-SUP7E USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
ISR-G2 IPSec ReadyLogo Phase 2
Linksys E4200 USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
79xx IP Phone USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
ACE4710 USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
ACE 30 blade for 6500 USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
ACE 30 blade for 7600 USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
Sx200 SOHO switch USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
Sx300 SOHO switch USGv6 and ReadyLogo Phase 2
ASR1K ReadyLogo USGv6 (retest) and ReadyLogo Phase 2
The Unified Network Services (UNS) portfolio of Layer 4-7 services (such as ACE and WAAS) also includes Cisco’s data center security solutions. A critical part of that security portfolio is our virtualization-aware firewall solution, Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). In a series of upcoming blog posts, I’ll be sharing a few use case scenarios that our customers are implementing with VSG.
For those of you new to VSG, I’ll point out that VSG’s role is to act as a virtual firewall between zones of virtual machines. Isolating traffic between VM zones has been very challenging prior to VSG because: 1) security policies have to be enforced between VMs running on the same server or same virtual switch (where there’s no place to put a firewall), 2) VMs move all around the network and the security policies (as enforced in the firewall) must follow the VM, and 3) the need to maintain segregation of duties for compliance purposes between the security and application server teams, where security is potentially enforced inside the virtual server.
