VMware Cloud Foundation has been the solution of choice for Enterprise IT administrators looking for a turn-key software-defined data center solution. Fundamentally, VMware Cloud Foundation brings together the different virtualization technologies – compute, storage, networking and management – to enable customers to build and operate a private or hybrid cloud as a single entity in an automated fashion. The VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 release announced at VMworld 2018 provided a number of new key capabilities to further deliver on our objective of simplifying how customers build an integrated hybrid cloud.
However, until now VCF only supported single-site Workload Domains with VM protection being only available within that single AZ (Availability Zone). In the event of a catastrophic failure of that AZ, the applications hosted within those Workload Domains become unavailable, resulting in significant service disruption. Customers were seeking to have the ability to maintain service availability across AZ failures.
I am happy to announce that with the latest VCF 3.01 release, customers can now use official manual guidance to support vSAN stretched Clusters. The guidance is also backwards compatible for customers who have already deployed VCF 3.0.
Here’s a sample deployment topology that illustrates some of the cross-site networking details for deploying vSAN stretched Clusters in VCF.
Benefits of VCF Stretched Cluster
- High-availability with ~zero RPO and low RTO (within minutes) for VMs deployed on VCF Workload Domain
- Fast recovery from a full / catastrophic failure of AZ.
- Application downtime avoidance during full / catastrophic failure of a AZ
- Ability to deploy and perform VCF lifecycle management for hosts on both Availability zones
For more information or if you have additional questions please head to VMware Communities site where you can find additional information and interact with some of our Cloud Foundation experts.
-Raj Venkat Sr. PLM @VMware Hybrid Cloud
