Kemp Technologies added Microsoft Hyper-V support to its virtual load balancing appliance, which will provide customers running Microsoft applications with load balancing, scalability and high availability, the company said on Oct. 19.
The Virtual LoadMaster now supports hypervisors from both Microsoft and VMware. Xen hypervisors will likely be supported in “a year or two,” said Peter Melerud, co-founder and vice-president of product management at Kemp Technologies.
The company said a significant segment of the existing user base used Kemp products to balance their existing Microsoft applications. Hyper-V will let them bundle specific applications to use Kemp’s VLM appliance.
“A large number of our customers already use the LoadMaster to enable application delivery for Microsoft server-based products such as Exchange 2010, Sharepoint, OCS and Terminal Services,” said Melerud.
Virtual Load Master is a full-featured application delivery controller available as a virtual appliance. VLM significantly improves performance, scalability, and availability of applications running on Hyper-V virtual machines, Kemp said in a statement.
The Virtual LoadMaster distributes Web and application traffic across best-performing virtual machines. It optimizes application access through included features such as SSL offload, content switching, Layer 4-7 load balancing, and server persistence, Kemp said. It also handles front-end capabilities such as caching, compression, and intrusion prevention, for applications.
VLM can be deployed in a redundant, active/hot standby configuration for business continuity. The load balancer appliance can also divert traffic from one data center to another during an outage or some other service disruption at the data center.
The virtual appliance is built on the same LoadMaster OS as its hardware counterpart. As a result, the feature set, management tool, and Web-based user interface are the same, making it easier for customers to switch between the virtual and physical appliance.
The appliances can detect when service is interrupted, and intelligently redirect user traffic to the best available site, minimizing potential downtime and business continuity across multiple, geographically-distributed servers and data centers, the company said in a statement.
The Hyper-V version of the software for Virtual LoadMaster is available for download from Kemp’s Web site, said Melerud.. Pricing starts at $1,990 and includes a first-year support agreement. The new hardware appliance is priced $2,990, although an introductory rate of $1490 is available. For existing customers the license obtained for VMware is applicable to Hyper-V, said Melerund. One year of full product support is included in the price.
Kemp makes application delivery products such as application delivery controllers, server load balancers, application front-end devices, Web switches, content switches, and application switches for businesses that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical applications, Kemp said.