Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager
Take Control of Your Applications

Features:

Autoscaling

Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager— Enterprise Edition features an auto-scaling capability to ensure reliable application service delivery by automatically managing traffic changes in real time, distributing traffic among a pool of virtual servers. It can orchestrate the provisioning and rightsizing of applications, helping to migrate traffic across multiple virtual and cloud platforms.

Advanced Event Handling

Configure appropriate responses for key infrastructure events, including email and SNMP alerts, syslog logging and custom user-supplied scripts.

Bandwidth Management

You can limit the total bandwidth (kbits/ sec) a set of connections can use which can be used to stop a popular site or application taking up so much bandwidth other sites or applications become unavailable. This can enable service providers to enforce access limits based on criteria such as account type or location.

Clustering

Traffic Manager has unmatched scale and performance, and is able to scale-up with the latest generation of multi-core CPUs, and scale out with N+M clustering for reliability and throughput.

Content Caching

Traffic Manager can stores copies of requested data on the Traffic Manager rather than the back end servers, freeing them up to deliver newly requested content. This can reduce the need for additional servers as traffic grows and speed up the response to end user requests.

Content Compression

Traffic Manager can compress content returned to the client rather than have that workload undertaken by the backend servers. Compression of content can result in bandwidth being used more efficiently. Offloading this workload from the back-end servers can enable it to serve requests faster.

Content Inspection

Use Traffic Manager to apply business policies to each request: geotargeting, edge authentication, session failover, all with a global view of the application cluster. Content inspection allows rapid web changes such as the insertion of marketing tags, branding changes, and dynamic watermarking, procedures that may be difficult to achieve by modifying the application itself.

RESTful Control API

Allows Traffic Manager to be configured and controlled by a third-party application and simplifies administration of large/ complex configurations. The Control API enables configuration changes to be automated (e.g. In response to an event).

Global Load Balancing

Improve service availability by automatically failing over to an alternative datacenter or cloud deployment in the event of a catastrophic failure. Improve service performance by performancesensitive load balancing and locationbased traffic routing.

Health Monitoring

Monitor the health and correct operation of servers with built-In and custom checks. Detect failures of servers and errors in applications, and route traffic away from these servers so that the performance of the application is not compromised and the user experience is maintained.

HTTP/2 Support

Faster web pages with support for HTTP/2 connections. HTTP/2 is a significant enhancement to the HTTP/1.1 standard: Traffic Manager can automatically negotiate an HTTP/2 connection with the client web browser, which may improve web page load time with techniques such as connection sharing, page request multiplexing and header compression. For even more advanced HTML and web content optimization, the optional Brocade Web Accelerator add-on module is available to create custom optimization profiles for individual applications.

Load Balancing

Traffic Manager can use a wide variety of algorithms and techniques and balance load based on different criteria (e.g. can send more requests to higher spec machines). Servers can be drained for easy maintenance/uninterrupted service. The client never has to see a server fail.

Multi-Site Capable

Deploy services across multiple sites with location-specific configuration and simplify and the management of services from multiple datacenter locations.

Performance Monitoring

Measures performance and load and gives a graphical representation of the results which can identify bottlenecks and identify where and when high loading occurs which can be useful for identifying future upgrade needs.

Request Rate Shaping

Traffic Manager can restrict the number of requests (per min or sec) to a service, from either all or a set of clients. This can stop a small group of intensive users (including spiders) hogging a service, leading to a poor user experience for all users.

Scalability

Traffic Manager can scale horizontally and vertically very easily, across IT environments and different forms of infrastructure ensuring that it can always scale up to match and support demand for an application or a service.

Service Level Monitoring

Monitors the performance of a service or application and can issue an alert if it falls below a pre-determined level such as going out of scope of an SLA.

Service Protection Classes

Traffic Manager can enforce an IP black/white list and limit the number of connections to a service. It can also enforce rules on HTTP content (e.g. enforce RFC compliance) and help protect against malicious attacks such as Denial of Service.

Session Persistence

Ensures all requests from a client go to the same server, enabling application data to persist throughout a session without using cookies (e.g. an e-commerce shopping basket).

Software or Virtual Appliance

The Traffic Manager is software and is available in a range of form factors and configurations, making it ideal for (private, public or hybrid) cloud and virtualized data center deployment.

SSL Performance

Off-loading SSL/TLS key exchanges and decryption to the Traffic Manager frees up the back-end servers use their full resources for generating content and responding to user requests. Decryption on the Traffic Manager allows for deep packet inspection. Content can be re-encrypted for secure forwarding of requests to the back-end infrastructure.

TrafficScript

TrafficScript is a sophisticated programming language integrated within the core of Traffic Manager that enables high performance, highly-configurable control of traffic management policies. TrafficScript rules can control all aspects of how traffic is managed and can choose when and where to apply request rate shaping, bandwidth shaping, routing, compression, and caching to prioritize the most valuable users and deliver the best possible levels of service. It can also help parse complex XML data using XPath in order to make informed routing decisions based on embedded content.

TrafficScript also supports the offload and acceleration of the translation between XML variants via XSL Transformations (XSLT). TrafficScript software is even powerful enough to create rules that transform requests and responses, correct invalid requests, apply security filtering and optimization, and allow complex response rewriting.

Deployment:

Figure 1: The advanced capabilities in Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager can be enhanced using TrafficScript or Java extensions.

Specifications:

Model	Standard Edition				Enterprise Edition
	1000 Series				2000 Series		4000 Series
Configuration	L	M	H	H1	L	M	L	M	H	VH
Profile	Software or virtual appliance
Throughput	10 Mbps	200 Mbps	1 Gbps	5 Gbps	1 Gbps	2 Gbps	5 Gbps	10 Gbps	20 Gbps	Uncapped
SSL transactions per second	Uncapped
Functionality	Core				Advanced

Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager Functionality Matrix

Model	Standard Edition	Enterprise Edition	Developer Edition
	1000 Model	2000, 4000 Models
Load Balancing
HTTP/2 Support
SSL Offload
Compression Offload
Web Content Caching
Simple RuleBuilder
TrafficScript
Java Extensions
IPV6 Support
App DoS Protection
Connection Analytics
Bandwidth Management
Rate Shaping
Service Level Monitoring
Application Auto-scaling
N+M Clustering
Events & Alerting
Global Load Balancing
Secure Access
Route Health Injection

Optional Features for Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager

Optional Features for Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager
Web Application Firewall	Add on module, includes a scalable Layer-7 Web Application Firewall (WAF) to apply business rules to your online traffic, inspect and block attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), and help achieve compliance with PCI-DSS and HIPAA and other regulatory demands.
Web Accelerator	Add on module, includes advanced Web Content Optimization (WCO) technologies, to accelerate page load times up to 4x for HTML applications, including Microsoft SharePoint, content management systems and cloud applications. WCO profiles can be customized for each application.
Web Accelerator Express	Add on module, includes baseline content optimization to acclerate the delivery of most web pages, requiring no configuration or tuning.
Support for FIPS 140-2 Level 1	Add on module, includes an embedded FIPS 140-2 level 1 cryptographic module per FIPS 140-2 implementation guidance section G.5 guidelines, to support deployments that require FIPS 140-2 level 1 compliance.

System Requirements: Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager Software and Virtual Appliances

System Requirements
Supported OS: Traffic Manager	Linux x86_64: Kernel 2.6.8 – 3.13 (2.6.22+ for IPv6), glibc 2.5+; Solaris 10 (x86_64)
Supported OS: Web Accelerator Add-On Option	Linux 2.6.22 or later (x86_64)
Virtual Environment: Virtual Appliance	VMware vSphere 5.0, 5.1, 5.5; XenServer 6.1, 6.2; OracleVM for x86 2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 3.3; Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 & 2012 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V under Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2; QEMU/KVM (RHEL/ CentOS 6.x, 7.x, Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04)
Recommended Hardware: CPU	Intel Xeon / AMD Opteron
Recommended Hardware: Minimum Memory	2 GB
Recommended Hardware: Minimum Disk Space	10 GB (Software), 16 GB (Virtual Appliance)

Licenses:

Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager Licenses

Model	Purpose	Performance	Support	Duration	Cost
Evaluation license	Evaluation, Pre-production	Uncapped	Eval Assistance and updates	15-30 days	No cost
Production license	Production	As licensed	Support and updates	Perpetual or subscription	Per device

Evaluation Licenses

Evaluation Licenses
Functional capabilities	Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager, full functionality, all options
Licensed performance	Uncapped
Deployment	On multiple servers for pre-production evaluation
Validity	30 days
Support	Software updates and Evaluation assistance available

Evaluation licenses may be used to process production traffic during the limited evaluation period.

Production Licenses

Production Licenses
Functional capabilities	As licensed
Licensed performance	From 10 Mbps throughput to “uncapped”, from 1,000 SSL TPS to “uncapped”
Deployment	On single system, bound to IP or MAC address
Validity	Perpetual or subscription
Support	Software updates and technical support
Licensing Note	Description
Production license keys	Production license keys may be used for any purposes, but only on a single system. Production license keys may be obtained from your Brocade partner. All types of license keys are subject to the Brocade End User License Agreement for Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager, which can be found at http://www.brocade.com/legal/index.page#sales
Evaluation license keys	Evaluation license keys may be used to process production traffic during the limited evaluation period. 30-day evaluation licenses Developer Edition software and Evaluation software may be requested at http://www.brocade.com/vADC.
Developer Mode	If the software does not have a valid license key, the software will run in “developer mode.” Developer mode enables all of the functionality of Brocade Traffic Manager and imposes a performance limit of 1 Mbps throughput. Users are allowed to distribute the Brocade vADC software and virtual appliances without a license key (‘Developer Edition’), so that they can be used in test and development environments to facilitate the creation and testing of production services. There is no charge for the Developer Edition, and Brocade does not provide technical support.
Perpetual Licenses	Perpetual licenses provide a perpetual (non-expiring) license key that may be used on one server. Support and software upgrades are not included with a perpetual license, and require payment of an annual support fee.
Subscription Licenses	Subscription licenses allow you to use the software for a period of time (the “term”) and oblige you to pay a periodic subscription fee (monthly) for that term. Subscription licenses include support and maintenance.
Performance Bands	Production licenses include a performance rating which specifies the maximum capacity of the software. The performance rating applies to outgoing bandwidth. Bandwidth capacity is applied to outgoing traffic only, after content compression, and is applied per instance of Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager. It limits the speed at which the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager reads data from the backend server nodes. If the capacity limit is reached, then outgoing traffic may be delayed momentarily. Connections are serviced in a fair manner. Connections will not be dropped unless outbound traffic greatly exceeds the bandwidth capacity for a sustained period of time, when no data can be transmitted before the client or server timeouts expire. The host hardware must be adequately specified in order to deliver the desired performance.
When are requests discarded or timed out?	Client software (web browsers) and server software (e.g. web or application servers) both impose timeouts for connections. If a connection is idle for longer than the timeout period, it is closed. Under heavy, sustained load, responses are processed in a fair manner and partial responses are delivered to ensure that all connections are serviced equally. This means that connections are rarely idle for long periods of time when there is data waiting to be written, so connections are very unlikely to be closed down prematurely due to the bandwidth shaping.
Which performance band should I choose?	Evaluation licenses do not restrict performance, and may be used for short periods on production sites to gauge performance requirements. You can determine how much traffic an existing service is processing using the historical activity graphs, current data from the activity charts, and data available via SNMP and SOAP. The historical activity charts record bandwidth smoothed over 5-minute periods; you should add a margin of 50 to 100 percent for traffic spikes. When you run with a performance-based license, the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager software will log a warning and raise an alert to inform any time that it is necessary to limit the performance. Traffic is queued, so your end users will experience a momentary slowdown in your service. You can then upgrade to a higher-capacity license if necessary.
What does “uncapped” performance mean?	“Uncapped performance” means that the license key does not apply a performance rating, and the software can process traffic as rapidly as the host system allows. Performance examples may be found in the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager Performance Quick Reference document.
What is “non-production” use?	In “developer mode,” software may only be used for non-production use:' “Non-production” use includes development, temporary testing, internal training, and proof-ofconcept purposes. “Production” use includes any purposes which could be regarded as “business-critical;” public Internet and internal intranet services, services that take live traffic, permanent replicas of production sites, permanent benchmarking and load testing environments, and any other services that are run on a commercial basis or for commercial gain.
What happens when a license expires?	Perpetual licenses do not expire. Other licenses issued by Brocade will have an expiration date. Once the expiration date has passed, the software reverts to developer mode, with bandwidth and performance restrictions. Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager software raises warnings and alerts well in advance of expiration, and if a license with an expiration date is used in production, customers should configure the Brocade software to email these warnings to an appropriate account. The zero-cost licenses that Brocade issues for non-production use can continue to be used at no cost unless Brocade has terminated the relevant license or developer program.
What does “bound to IP address/MAC address” mean?	Production licenses may be deployed on a single nominated host system only. To this end, they contain either an IP address or a MAC address that identifies the host system, and will only operate on a host with a matching address. Technical workarounds to deploy the license simultaneously on two or more host systems are in breach of the End-User License Agreement.
Upgrading and transferring licenses	Production licenses may be transferred between host machines, operating systems and platorms at no charge. Please request an “IP Address Change” form from your Brocade support contact. Production licenses may be upgraded to increase performance capacity or unlock additional features – license upgrades are seamless and do not require a software restart.

Production licenses may be used for any purposes, but only on a single system.

Documentation:

Download the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager Datasheet(PDF).