Technology Alliance

Microsoft

Extract Maximum Value From Your Microsoft Investments

For more than a decade, F5 and Microsoft have partnered to develop joint solutions that help you get the most value from your technology investments. Whether for dynamic data centers, cloud solutions, or unified communications, F5 provides intelligent application delivery by placing strategic points of control in your infrastructure. Deep integration, expert deployment guidance, and a vibrant support community enable F5 products to enhance Microsoft technologies with maximum availability, performance, and security.

 

Microsoft Azure & Azure Stack

Microsoft’s Azure platform provides a robust set of hosting tools that can reduce overall operational costs. Azure increases the flexibility and scalability of application deployment for enterprises moving to the public cloud. The Microsoft Azure Stack platform allows users to leverage Azure tools and resources in an on-premises deployment, allowing for the replication of architectures across both public and private cloud environments, as well as the creation of a truly hybrid cloud operating model.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server, the leading system for email messaging and calendar functionality, enables users to access mailboxes from wherever they go—on PCs and mobile devices, and through web browsers.

F5 provides an intelligent application delivery solution for Exchange Server, which combines dynamic network products for securing, optimizing, and accelerating the Exchange environment with world-class professional services support. With F5, you can maximize the ROI on your Exchange deployments.


Microsoft Lync Server

The Microsoft Lync Server unified communications platform helps enterprise users manage real-time communications, including IM, VoIP, and audio and video web conferencing.

The F5 Application Ready Solution for Microsoft Lync Server maximizes security, availability, reliability, and speed for your unified communications deployment. F5 and Microsoft work closely to ensure successful interoperability and top performance for your environment, with a well-documented, prescriptive solution that also reduces deployment, management, and administration costs.

Microsoft SharePoint Server

Microsoft SharePoint Server makes it easier for people to work together using enterprise collaboration websites for sharing and managing information, documents, and data.

F5 works closely with Microsoft to develop Application Ready Solutions for SharePoint. These solutions ensure your network is SharePoint-ready with a complete suite of application infrastructure technologies that secure and accelerate your deployment. Using custom-developed policies and profiles, you’ll be able to deliver high availability and top performance for SharePoint— and you’ll also gain support for the newest release, SharePoint Server 2013.


Microsoft Virtualization

Microsoft provides a comprehensive platform and a suite of management technologies to help you create an integrated, end-to-end virtualized infrastructure.

Through its close collaboration and technology integration with Microsoft, F5 helps you dynamically manage IT resources in a virtualized application environment. Take advantage of step-by-step guidance for deploying F5 solutions with Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to get the most from your virtualization initiatives.

Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

Remote Desktop Services is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) component of Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 that lets users work anywhere by extending desktop and application deployments to any device.

As enterprises deploy Remote Desktop Services in their environment, security, network performance, and service availability become critical success factors. F5's advanced traffic management capabilities help you ensure that users can securely access Remote Desktop Services with the best end-user experience possible.

 


Microsoft Windows Server

The Microsoft Windows Server platform helps IT pros maximize control over their infrastructure while providing unprecedented availability and management capabilities. Windows Server 2012, provides a complete virtualization environment and connectivity to cloud services for rich user experiences and greater efficiency.

Through close collaboration, integration, and thorough testing with Microsoft, F5 offers comprehensive guidance on using the F5 Application Ready Solution to implement Windows Server components—such as Internet Information Services (IIS) and Remote Desktop Services (RDS)—for optimal performance and availability.

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), a component of Windows Server, provides a secure, easy-to-manage platform for hosting websites, services, and applications.

F5 Application Ready Solutions guarantee an optimized and efficient network for IIS, to ensure that you get the most from the applications and services you operate. F5 improves IIS performance, availability, and scalability, and also reduces deployment cycles and management costs. To streamline and enhance your web and application server environment, take advantage of F5’s comprehensive IIS configuration and deployment guidance.

 


Microsoft DirectAccess and Forefront Unified Access Gateway

Microsoft DirectAccess and Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) provide secure remote access to corporate resources from a range of endpoints and locations, including managed and unmanaged PCs and mobile devices. Forefront UAG enforces granular access controls based on a user’s identity and device health, and includes built-in access control mechanisms such as advanced authentication, SSL VPN, application authorization, and endpoint inspection.

F5 provides the network infrastructure and step-by-step configuration guidance you need to scale your Microsoft DirectAccess and Forefront UAG deployments and ensure high availability, performance, and security—for maximum ROI.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) suite with marketing, sales, and service capabilities that help businesses of all sizes to find, develop, and win profitable customer relationships.

F5 solutions guarantee an optimized and efficient network for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment. They help you ensure top performance, high availability and scalability, and tight security for customer data. With F5, you can improve the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user experience while providing your IT department with step-by-step configuration guidance to reduce deployment cycles, streamline management, and ultimately trim costs.


Microsoft PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is a task-based command line shell and scripting language that helps IT pros control and automate the Windows operating system and apps that run on Windows. Using built-in Windows PowerShell commands, called cmdlets, you can manage the computers in your enterprise from the command line.

The F5 BIG-IP system integrates with Windows PowerShell through F5’s web-services enabled iControl API. iControl PowerShell cmdlets and scripts make use of F5’s iControl .NET Assembly, and can be used to manage F5 devices. This integration gives you a quick, easy, and centralized way to manage F5 devices from the Windows PowerShell command line.

Microsoft Cloud Platform System

The Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) is a sophisticated “cloud-in-a-box” solution that allows enterprises to quickly build or scale out their hybrid cloud infrastructure without the risk and complexity of home-grown systems. Each Microsoft CPS stamp supports from one to four racks and includes a preconfigured pair of F5 VIPRIONs to provide high-availability and traffic management capabilities, with integrated orchestration through the Microsoft System Center. VIPRION provides the scalability, multi-tenant capabilities and flexible management options needed to optimize cloud solutions at scale.

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