If you visit the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) product page on VMware.com, you’ll learn that “VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform that brings together VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX into a natively integrated stack to deliver enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for the private and public cloud.” Now, you may be thinking that means that when you buy VCF, you’ll be spending time installing ESXi on physical hosts, configuring vSAN and figuring out how to build out an NSX environment. If that’s the case, you’re in for a treat. You don’t have to do any of that – VCF does it for you! Let’s briefly look at how VMware Cloud Foundation makes it easy to deploy infrastructure (without wasting your time on a bunch of mundane tasks).
Customers wanting to deploy VCF on-premises can choose to buy a pre-built, factory-racked and cabled solution that includes physical servers with internal storage optimized for vSAN, physical network switches and pre-staged VMware software on the servers, nicely packaged and delivered from one of our integration partners such as Dell EMC VxRack SDDC, QTC or Fujitsu. Alternatively, customers can choose to procure VCF-compatible vSAN Ready Nodes and physical switching and do the rack & stack and cabling themselves, followed by an install of the VCF software. The former is certainly the easier route, but both are acceptable modes of acquisition.
Regardless of your method of acquisition, getting hardware onto the data center floor is just a small step towards deploying usable infrastructure. What would come next in a traditional environment is a lengthy process of installing ESXi, deploying vCenter servers, tweaking settings in BIOS, configuring physical network ports and virtual switches… the list of tasks goes on and on. VMware Cloud Foundation transforms this using the power of the included ‘SDDC Manager’ software. Through SDDC Manager, the infrastructure admin can complete these tasks and all the others necessary to have a fully functional vSphere environment with just a few simple clicks in the SDDC Manager’s web interface.
The result? A fully configured environment, including vSAN for storage and NSX for advanced networking, vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Operations for monitoring your environment, correctly configured physical networking and server hardware – all in a fully tested, VMware prescribed design.
With VCF, you can measure in hours the time it takes to deploy your private cloud infrastructure – from powering up your VCF rack for the first time to having a fully functional vSphere, VSAN and NSX environment that is ready to be carved into Workload Domains for consumption by your business. What used to take days or even weeks of manual, error-prone tasks is transformed through VCF’s simple infrastructure provisioning workflow. VCF’s simple infrastructure deployment capabilities help you transition from being a virtual infrastructure administrator to a private cloud admin, enabling you to find new ways to leverage your infrastructure to provide real value to your business.
