How is a virtual load balancer different from a hardware load balancer?

A virtual load balancer runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor or in the cloud, while a hardware load balancer runs on a dedicated physical appliance. The virtual option runs on infrastructure you already operate, whether that is your own data center or a cloud region. A HAProxy ALOHA hardware appliance still fits when you want a dedicated device and physical isolation on-premises.

What do you need to run a virtual load balancer?

You need a supported hypervisor or cloud platform, so there is no dedicated appliance to rack or maintain. You import the virtual machine image and configure your load balancing services, and it runs alongside your existing workloads.

How is HAProxy ALOHA virtual different from HAProxy Enterprise?

HAProxy ALOHA virtual is a ready-to-run virtual appliance, so the load balancer and its operating system arrive as one image that you deploy and manage as an appliance. HAProxy Enterprise is the load balancer software you install and run yourself on infrastructure you manage, including virtual machines, containers and Linux software packages. It can also be centrally managed across many instances by the HAProxy Fusion Control Plane, while HAProxy ALOHA virtual is managed on its own as a standalone appliance. Choose HAProxy ALOHA virtual when you want an appliance experience without maintaining the underlying system, and choose the HAProxy Enterprise load balancer when you want to run the software yourself and manage many instances centrally.

Load balancing built for simpler operations

The plug and play enterprise virtual load balancer

The virtual load balancer that ships ready.

HAProxy ALOHA delivers high-performance proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7 for critical services, built on the proven HAProxy Enterprise engine. It deploys pre-configured on your hypervisor or cloud platform, so you're running in minutes, and operations stay simple.

Purpose-built software that delivers the same load balancing and security for TCP, UDP, QUIC, and HTTP/S.

Contact us to clarify which solution fits your needs the best or take a look at our hardware load balancer.

Satisfaction score (per G2 Reviews)

Customer retention (annual renewals)

Years in production (at global scale)

“Just spinning it up is extremely cheap for us. The amount of overhead… is almost negligible. In steady state, HAProxy doesn’t use any CPU, or any noticeable CPU.”

Tobias Haag Software Engineering Lead

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Production-ready load balancing for any hypervisor

Benefits of the HAProxy ALOHAvirtual load balancer

HAProxy ALOHA virtual gives teams a turnkey virtual load balancer that drops into existing hypervisor estates and behaves like a dedicated appliance, without the rack or the procurement cycle.

Deploys as a VM image

A pre-packaged image for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. Import, power on, and route production traffic from the same hypervisor environment that hosts the rest of your stack.

Built on HAProxy Enterprise

The same enterprise core, packaged as a virtual machine. You get the full Layer 4 and Layer 7 feature set and the same management experience, with no wait on shipping or procurement.

Appliance experience, no hardware constraints

Test it, snapshot it, clone it, and roll it back like any other VM. Right-size compute and network resources to match traffic, with throughput scaling up to the limits of your hypervisor host.

PacketShield DDoS protection

Patented packet-level filtering blocks unwanted traffic in software, with zero false positives, so you can stop attacks before they reach your application stack. For line-rate filtering in hardware at up to 10 Gbps wire speed, see HAProxy ALOHA Hardware.

Achieving multi-datacenter high availability with HAProxy ALOHA & GSLB

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High Availability Performance Load Balancing / Routing

Achieving multi-datacenter high availability with HAProxy ALOHA & GSLB

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Baptiste Assmann Director of Product

HAProxy ALOHA virtual features

Key capabilities of the HAProxy ALOHA virtual load balancer

HAProxy ALOHA virtual combines the Layer 4 and Layer 7 features of HAProxy Enterprise with the operational simplicity of a virtual load balancer.

Read the datasheet

Load Balancing Performance Security Virtual appliance Administration

haproxy-aloha-global-server-load-balancing-technical-diagram

Flexible traffic management across every hypervisor

Power your applications and APIs regardless of demand, hypervisor, or underlying tech stack.

Multiple load balancing modes

Load balance Layer 4 (networking) or Layer 7 (application) traffic. Supports reverse proxy, transparent proxy, direct server return, NAT, IPIP, and VIP-less modes for greater flexibility across application delivery use cases.

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)

Designate HAProxy ALOHA virtual as an authoritative DNS server across global regions and route client requests to local data centers. Enables failover and round-robin distribution, with simple config management for multiple zones and secure HTTPS health checking.

High availability

Keep your applications and APIs online with advanced health checks, backup server support, traffic overload protection, VRRP floating virtual IPs, and route health injection.

Broad protocol support

Load balance HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, HTTP/3 over QUIC, UDP, gRPC, FastCGI, Financial Information eXchange (FIX), MQTT, and more.

Low-latency performance for virtual environments

HAProxy ALOHA virtual is engineered for efficient throughput inside your hypervisor, performing well even on shared compute, with room to scale by adjusting the VM resource profile.

Compression

Compress HTTP responses before passing them to clients. Reduces payload sizes, bandwidth usage, and server CPU load.

Connection management

Dynamically control server-side connections for better resource usage, and filter malformed TCP connections and HTTP requests.

Buffering and queueing

Accelerate TCP and HTTP performance by intelligently managing data flows, giving the recipient time to process data without becoming overwhelmed.

HTTP header manipulation

Alter any HTTP header within each request or response to use caching more effectively, reduce data payloads, and use mechanisms such as Keep-Alive.

WAF, bot management, TLS, and PacketShield in a single appliance

HAProxy ALOHA virtual load balancer includes a complete set of security features to keep your applications, users, and data safe.

HAProxy Enterprise WAF

Powered by our Intelligent WAF Engine and threat intelligence from HAProxy Edge, our WAF delivers a balanced accuracy of 99.65% with ultra-low latency and zero-day threat protection. Customize protection for different apps and locations with WAF Profiles.

HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module

Stop DDoS attacks, fraud, scraping, and brute force attacks without blocking legitimate bots or tools. The Threat Detection Engine classifies and labels complex threats with high accuracy, adapts to your traffic profile, and keeps data private with 100% local processing.

High-performance TLS

End-to-end TLS encryption for all communication. TLS termination at the appliance speeds up decryption while minimizing added latency. The AWS-LC library provides best-available performance at any scale.

PacketShield filtering

Patented DDoS protection filters incoming packets in software to block unwanted traffic in real time with zero false positives. For line-rate filtering in hardware at up to 10 Gbps wire speed, see HAProxy ALOHA Hardware.

Built for your hypervisor

HAProxy ALOHA virtual delivers the Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing features of the hardware appliance, packaged specifically for the leading hypervisors.

Multi-hypervisor support

Deployable as a virtual image with native support for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. Drop it into the hypervisor estate your team already runs.

Native management

An embedded GUI handles configuration, real-time performance monitoring, security, health, and connection details. Use the Network Management API to script and automate appliance configuration.

Flexible network architecture

Aggregate links and create VLANs quickly, while fully controlling how the network is presented to the underlying VM. Build and simulate complex networking environments without paying for extra physical equipment.

Simulate your full network stack on a single host

Test how your networking setup reacts to changing traffic, failover events, and dynamic packet flows. Run the client, the DNS servers, and GSLB-enabled DNS zones all on one host for testing and validation.

If you need a dedicated appliance with line-rate PacketShield, see HAProxy ALOHA Hardware.

Take control of your virtual load balancer

HAProxy ALOHA virtual ships with a complete set of GUI and API-driven management tools so your infrastructure keeps running smoothly.

Standards-based administration

Support for SNMP, NTP, Syslog, and VRRP keeps your load-balancing setup synchronized, manageable, and reliable.

Management interfaces for every operator

Manage configuration, provisioning, monitoring, and diagnostics through the web interface or the Network Administration API. Connect directly via the VM console or remotely via SSH.

Configuration templating

Deploy your applications in minutes without writing complex configuration sections from scratch. Quickly configure network interfaces, link aggregation, VLAN membership, and IP-related parameters.

VLAN tagging

Identify and isolate traffic by assigning unique VLANs to groups of devices and their Ethernet frames. Track network packets and control traffic flows while boosting performance and security.

What are users saying about HAProxy ALOHA?

"I enjoy having an interface without extra frills or anything fancy. It makes it simple to input your config, easy to check the status of your applications, and quick to deploy. When you have questions or need configuration assistance, the ALOHA team does an excellent job in helping."

Austin E., via G2 Infrastructure Manager

Featured Resources

Learn tips, tricks, and best practices for getting the most out of HAProxy ALOHA — and stay up to date with new product developments.

See more resources

Blog

Announcing HAProxy Enterprise 3.3 and HAProxy ALOHA 18.0

HAProxy Enterprise 3.3 brings significant advancements to HAProxy Enterprise WAF and bot management capabilities. HAProxy ALOHA 18.0 delivers OWASP CRS v4 support.

PacketShield: A Tool for Superior DDoS Protection

Learn more about the HAProxy ALOHA PacketShield product, which provides stateful packet filtering and protects your network against DDoS.

Ready to deploy your virtual load balancer?

Talk to the HAProxy team about the right HAProxy ALOHA virtual configuration for your traffic volume and security requirements.

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Frequently Asked Questions

A virtual load balancer distributes incoming traffic across your backend servers while running as a virtual machine, rather than on a dedicated physical device. It deploys on a hypervisor or in the cloud, so you can add load balancing to infrastructure you already run instead of buying and installing new hardware. This makes it a good fit for virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

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