ClusterFunk

Quick note Zeus have released version 5.1 of the excellent ZXTM.

The low impact cache refresh and support for VLANs is very good news.

The low impact cache will eliminate problems associated with large volume of requests been sent to your origin when the cache is expired. This is a big issue if you use any edge cache solution to deliver a very popular site with a small back-end infrastructure.

Support for VLANs

This will address the current limitation of 4 nics per VM in ESX 3x.Support for VLANs will allow switches to "route" traffic to appropriate (via support for 802.1Q) VLAN eliminating the need for a different interface per IP based services. e.g. multiple web servers hosting different components of a solution such as image serving, app servers, SSO, static content etc all of which run on port 80.

Feature list  

ZXTM 5.1 is a feature and maintenance update to the ZXTM product family. It has a number of new features:

• New Event Handling capability allows an administrator to configure precisely what actions ZXTM should take if particular events occur;
• Low-impact cache refresh pre-emptively refreshes ZXTM’s content cache when entries are due to expire; this eliminates spikes of requests when cached entries expire;
• Support for SSL-wrapped FTP;
• SSL protocol extensions, including TLS Server Name and Diffie-Hellman ciphers;
• Support for VLANs on ZXTM hardware and virtual appliances;
• Support for the SCA 6000 FIPs crypto card.

ZXTM 5.1 is available as a VMware OVF distribution for VMware users (as an alternative to the VHD disk image), and the supported platforms list for ZXTM software now includes Microsoft Hyper-V 32bit (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10).

For more details of the changes, take a look at the ZXTM 5.1 Release Notes.