Updates to Cisco’s ACE Load Balancers

Introducing ACE30 Module

Cisco has released some hardware updates to their ACE load balancers. The ACE20 has been replaced with the ACE30, offering increases in SSL transactions per second, L4/L7 connections per second and HTTP compression. See the table below for more metrics on how the ACE30 has surpassed the ACE20 module:

Updates to ACE Software

Cisco is also updating the software for the ACE30 module and ACE 4710 appliance to A4(1.0). Going forward, Cisco will release one software release for both the ACE module and ACE appliance. A4(1.0) will include these new features:

• In-band health checking of real servers for better and faster monitoring.
• Hardware-based HTTP compression.
• SSL Cipher-based load balancing to send clients with lower encryption to a separate serverfarm.
• Many others like probe inheritance, buddy associations of cookies across multiple services, and better integration with GSS.

Updates to ANM

I’ve also seen a demo of Application Network Manager (ANM) 4.1 and it looks much sleeker than the past version of ANM. ANM is the GUI management system for ACE for those less-inclined to the CLI. Up till now, I’ve always been a CLI guy, but with the introduction of topology maps and historical/real-time graphs I may just have to come over to the dark side of ANM. Check out the screenshot below of the new interface:


Updated features to ANM include:

• Visualizations – topology maps, historical graphs, realt-time graphs, VM details
• VMware Integration – easy creation of real servers from VM information provided by vCenter
• ANM Appliance – closed virtual appliance to deploy as a VM within vCenter
• Operations API – automate exporting information and adding, removing and modifying servers as well as support for 3rd party tools
• Scheduled ACE Backup – automated backup of ACE configurations

Conclusion

I love to see advancements in this area of Cisco’s arsenal. ACE load balancing combined with GSS site failover mixed with OTV is going to be big. Imagine automatically swinging the load from the local load balanced serverfarm to a remote serverfarm in a different data center when traffic bursts beyond the local serverfarm’s configured thresholds. The future is fast becoming reality.

– Andrew

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