Virtual Traffic Manager Product Variants

The Virtual Traffic Manager product family is available in a variety of software, hardware appliance, virtual appliance, and cloud instance configurations.

All variants share the same core Virtual Traffic Manager software, but different versions might provide different levels of functionality depending on the host platform or enabling license key.

This guide documents the full functionality of the Virtual Traffic Manager software with all options enabled. It might describe features and capabilities that are not present or visible in the version of the product you are using. Features present but not enabled are greyed-out and un-selectable in the Admin UI.

Ivanti provides a number of optional Virtual Traffic Manager components, available only through an appropriate license key upgrade:

Virtual Web Application Firewall (vWAF): Provides advanced attack detection and protection for your Web applications. See The Virtual Web Application Firewall for more details about how this fits into your Virtual Traffic Manager infrastructure. For full product details and instructions, see the Virtual Web Application Firewall: User’s Guide, available from the Ivanti Web site at www.ivanti.com.

Web Accelerator (Web Content Accelerator): Provides content optimization functionality for your Web applications. This is available as either a fully integrated component of the Virtual Traffic Manager, or in standalone proxy mode whereby the load balancing aspects of the Virtual Traffic Manager are disabled. Your sales representative can provide details about which variant is most appropriate for your needs. Using Web Accelerator, provides full details about how to enable and configure Web Content Accelerator for your infrastructure.

Your product version specifications describe which capabilities are enabled in your particular variant. See also the applicable Virtual Traffic Manager: Installation and Getting Started Guide available from the Ivanti Web site at www.ivanti.com.

The Virtual Traffic Manager Community Edition

When unlicensed, the Virtual Traffic Manager defaults to running as the Community Edition. In this state, the Virtual Traffic Manager operates normally and with full functionality, but with a bandwidth limit of 10Mb/second and cluster size limit of 4. The Community Edition is designed as a free, production-ready, variant of the Virtual Traffic Manager useful for system administrators and application developers wanting to try out advanced vADC (virtual Application Delivery Controller) capabilities in a production environment.

Ivanti recommends that you contact your support provider for details of how to purchase a license key suitable for your needs.

Supported Platforms

The Virtual Traffic Manager software can be deployed on a range of platforms, on physical or virtual servers, and in cloud infrastructures. Refer to the release notes and documentation at www.ivanti.com for up-to-date platform and version number requirements.

Software

The Virtual Traffic Manager is available as a software package suitable for deployment on existing supported Linux and UNIX servers. Supported distributions are listed in the release notes as mentioned above.

Appliances

Ivanti provides the Virtual Traffic Manager as an appliance disk image, suitable for deployment on approved server hardware platforms.

Virtual Appliances

Ivanti provides Virtual Traffic Manager virtual appliance packages for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and QEMU/KVM.

Cloud Computing Services

The Virtual Traffic Manager is supported for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine (GCE). Ivanti additionally supports installing the Virtual Traffic Manager software variant on supported Linux and UNIX virtual machine instances running on EC2 and GCE.

Supported Cluster Combinations

As discussed in previous sections, The Virtual Traffic Manager is available as a number of product variants on a selection of platforms. In addition to the core Virtual Traffic Manager software, various product options and capabilities are available through a suitable license upgrade.

When clustering multiple Virtual Traffic Managers together for high-availability and redundancy, it is possible to take advantage of The Virtual Traffic Manager’s flexible architecture and host instances on different platforms within the same cluster. However, some care must be taken to ensure that each cluster member is running the same product configuration.

The following should be taken into account when planning your cluster:

Mixing different supported host operating systems for the software variant is supported and should not adversely affect cluster operations.

Although mixing license key types is technically possible within the cluster, it is not recommended. There are likely to be warnings and/or errors within the Admin UI if features only licensed on a sub-set of the cluster are used. This is due to the automatic config replicator attempting to apply non-licensed functionality across the cluster.

Cloud instances cannot directly be clustered with non-cloud instances (software, virtual appliance, hardware appliance). However, the multi-site cluster management1 feature enables centralized control of multiple Virtual Traffic Manager clusters regardless of location.

The vWAF feature cannot be used in a mixed-platform cluster (for example, software and virtual appliance).

Having different product versions within a cluster is unsupported, except in the case of performing an upgrade (or downgrade) of the entire cluster. During this transient state, some Virtual Traffic Managers will report that they are running different versions to others in the cluster. This is to be expected, and you should find that such error conditions are cleared once all cluster members have been upgraded.

If you are in any doubt as to the potential effects of running your proposed Virtual Traffic Manager infrastructure, Ivanti recommends contacting your support provider for assistance.