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Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance

Thursday, 09 November 2006 by Michel Roth

Zeus Technology released its Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance (ZXTM VA) for VMWare, a software-based version of its traffic management system for virtual environments. It's got admin traffic cops written all over it.

Traffic managers are sometimes called load balancers. They are used in virtual environments to do just as the names imply. The value proposition of a traffic manager is to accelerate, secure and manage the apps in the back end. This is done by balancing out the load to different physical servers or virtual servers, prioritizing certain types of traffic, determining which server should handle a function or where data needs to be delivered.

Such devices already exist, but as separate hardware devices that connect to a virtual server. ZXTM VA is a virtual, software-based appliance that runs on VMware's ESX Server 3 datacenter infrastructure. So it needs no separate hardware. ZXTM VA is downloadable to a VMWare server and can be configured through a browser-based interface. DiLeo said this means ZXTM VA does all of the traffic handling and no changes or tweaks need to be made to the target operating systems.

Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance for VMWare is available today, with prices starting at $11,000 and going as high as $40,000, depending on the environment in which the system is deployed.

More info here.