Understanding the Acceleration Enabled option in NSX based Load Balancer

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Customer would like to configure Layer 4 and Layer 7 optimization on the Load Balancer and would like to understand how the different combinations of setting work i.e. configured at Global Level versus local Virtual Server Level

Environment

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4.x

Resolution

There are two places in the Load Balancer configuration where L4/L7 acceleration can be configured. 

The Global Level option is named as Acceleration Enabled as seen below.


The server specific option is configured inside the Virtual Server configuration and is called Enable Acceleration as seen below.




When global AccelerationEnabled is false, all virtualservers are based on L7 engine.

When global AccelerationEnabled is true, each virtualserver can still specify local AccelerationEnable to override it:

• For a given virtualserver, if it is local AccelerationEnable is false, we will use L7 engine for this virtualserver;
• For a given virtualserver, if it is local AccelerationEnable is true, LB will detect the current virtualserver settings and will use L4 engine as possible. However, if there is L7 settings, such as http cookie persistence, url algorithm, ssl termination etc., LB will still use L7 engine. Otherwise, L4 engine will be used.