Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
Real User
Top 5
May 19, 2026
I have been using VMWare Avi Load Balancer as a database engineer for the past three to five years. Most of our dependent databases, virtual IPs, and cluster dependencies have numerous connections and dependencies to VMWare Avi Load Balancer. Our main use case for VMWare Avi Load Balancer involves numerous clusters for our database environment with many independent computers connecting to each other with Windows failover clustering. Primarily for databases, we use it for high availability and failover handling, replication awareness, and resiliency to avoid having one point of failure. A major use case is for database proxies, often using ProxySQL and PgBouncer. Instead of exposing our connection pooler directly, we place an Avi VIP in the middle, followed by PgBouncer nodes as our connection pooler, and then the database. This approach provides high availability at the connection endpoint and allows us to scale PgBouncer horizontally. A specific example of when VMWare Avi Load Balancer made a difference for my team involves our read-write splitting for MySQL and PostgreSQL. We have read-write traffic to the primary and read traffic to replicas. We use Avi for L4 load balancing for database pods on port 5432 for MySQL and port 3306 for PostgreSQL, using TCP health checks and routing based on service pools. Another scenario involves PostgreSQL high availability with Patroni on VMware VMs. We have three PostgreSQL VMs managed by Patroni running on VMware vSphere, with the VIP managed by VMWare Avi Load Balancer. The architecture flows from the application to the Avi virtual IP to the PostgreSQL clusters. Without Avi, the problem would be that the application would connect directly to PostgreSQL, and if PostgreSQL crashes, Patroni promotes the second PostgreSQL instance, but the application still points to the old IP, which causes connections to fail. With Avi, this is managed through a pool of nodes that are managed and provide interchange high availability. Apart from use cases for primary replica routing, read-write splitting, high availability for database proxies, and Kubernetes with databases, VMWare Avi Load Balancer integrates with Kubernetes, allowing auto-discovery of services and dynamic scaling. VMWare Avi Load Balancer also provides cloud-native database as a service platform for internet database platforms, which enables integration of database as a service that requires numerous connections.
We are using native cloud capability. The issue is not from us. VMware changed their module. They are selling perpetual licenses with multi-year support. The reason for this change is to make their offering similar to Palo Alto and other technology providers. They started selling something called VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, which is based on credits. When people start converting or translating the number of their physical cores to actual hypervisor cores using VCF, they are surprised with extremely high prices. Additionally, VMware sent an email to OCI and other hypervisors stating they will not sell their integrated product with them anymore. If any client comes to them, they must take their hardware and come directly to Broadcom as VMware has changed ownership. They must buy VCF licenses directly from Broadcom. Here is the catch: they request an extremely high price to do version upgrades. Some clients refuse because they question why they should be charged for an upgrade when VMware made the change to their product. Even when we take a very high discount for those clients, they decide to move out of VMware.
In my company, we use Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as a global load balancer since its best points are its interface, and good infrastructure, making it a very modernized tool.
Avi Load Balancer is the next-generation load balancer, which VMware provides. Earlier, we used a traditional type of load balancer. Due to the limitation of this traditional load balancer, we deployed this next-generation load balancer. This has very advanced capabilities like a web application firewall and very high-level visibility of an application's traffic flow.
SASE - Anywhere Workspace Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jun 21, 2022
Typically, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is used for application delivery, some security use cases, and some Kubernetes service mesh. The primary use cases of the solution are application delivery and resiliency.
VMWare Avi Load Balancer is designed for seamless integration with host environments, providing a user-friendly interface, stable deployment, scalability, and reliable performance.VMWare Avi Load Balancer offers a potent combination of advanced traffic management, application delivery, and network visualization tools tailored for cloud and modern infrastructures. Its core functionalities revolve around a robust web application firewall and comprehensive analytics, which make it a strong...
I have been using VMWare Avi Load Balancer as a database engineer for the past three to five years. Most of our dependent databases, virtual IPs, and cluster dependencies have numerous connections and dependencies to VMWare Avi Load Balancer. Our main use case for VMWare Avi Load Balancer involves numerous clusters for our database environment with many independent computers connecting to each other with Windows failover clustering. Primarily for databases, we use it for high availability and failover handling, replication awareness, and resiliency to avoid having one point of failure. A major use case is for database proxies, often using ProxySQL and PgBouncer. Instead of exposing our connection pooler directly, we place an Avi VIP in the middle, followed by PgBouncer nodes as our connection pooler, and then the database. This approach provides high availability at the connection endpoint and allows us to scale PgBouncer horizontally. A specific example of when VMWare Avi Load Balancer made a difference for my team involves our read-write splitting for MySQL and PostgreSQL. We have read-write traffic to the primary and read traffic to replicas. We use Avi for L4 load balancing for database pods on port 5432 for MySQL and port 3306 for PostgreSQL, using TCP health checks and routing based on service pools. Another scenario involves PostgreSQL high availability with Patroni on VMware VMs. We have three PostgreSQL VMs managed by Patroni running on VMware vSphere, with the VIP managed by VMWare Avi Load Balancer. The architecture flows from the application to the Avi virtual IP to the PostgreSQL clusters. Without Avi, the problem would be that the application would connect directly to PostgreSQL, and if PostgreSQL crashes, Patroni promotes the second PostgreSQL instance, but the application still points to the old IP, which causes connections to fail. With Avi, this is managed through a pool of nodes that are managed and provide interchange high availability. Apart from use cases for primary replica routing, read-write splitting, high availability for database proxies, and Kubernetes with databases, VMWare Avi Load Balancer integrates with Kubernetes, allowing auto-discovery of services and dynamic scaling. VMWare Avi Load Balancer also provides cloud-native database as a service platform for internet database platforms, which enables integration of database as a service that requires numerous connections.
We are using native cloud capability. The issue is not from us. VMware changed their module. They are selling perpetual licenses with multi-year support. The reason for this change is to make their offering similar to Palo Alto and other technology providers. They started selling something called VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, which is based on credits. When people start converting or translating the number of their physical cores to actual hypervisor cores using VCF, they are surprised with extremely high prices. Additionally, VMware sent an email to OCI and other hypervisors stating they will not sell their integrated product with them anymore. If any client comes to them, they must take their hardware and come directly to Broadcom as VMware has changed ownership. They must buy VCF licenses directly from Broadcom. Here is the catch: they request an extremely high price to do version upgrades. Some clients refuse because they question why they should be charged for an upgrade when VMware made the change to their product. Even when we take a very high discount for those clients, they decide to move out of VMware.
In my company, we use Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as a global load balancer since its best points are its interface, and good infrastructure, making it a very modernized tool.
Avi Load Balancer is the next-generation load balancer, which VMware provides. Earlier, we used a traditional type of load balancer. Due to the limitation of this traditional load balancer, we deployed this next-generation load balancer. This has very advanced capabilities like a web application firewall and very high-level visibility of an application's traffic flow.
Our primary use case for this solution is for application delivery controls, and the solution is deployed on cloud.
Typically, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is used for application delivery, some security use cases, and some Kubernetes service mesh. The primary use cases of the solution are application delivery and resiliency.