I wanted to call this post “Seven Easy Things You Need to Do Before Installing VCF” but I am not one for clickbait titles.
If you’ve subscribed to VMware Cloud Foundation or it’s in your future plan, one thing is for sure: we’re here to help you get started with VCF adoption.
The question is, “How do you get started?” Below are some recommendations. Your account team can get you started with any of these.
Treat VCF as a Full Private Cloud Platform
In my last post, I encouraged you to think of VMware as a full IaaS private cloud, and if you include the Tanzu Platform, we’re offering PaaS as well.
If you’ve never thought of VMware as IaaS/PaaS, the question is why not? I am still amazed by engineers everywhere who utter the phrase “VMware has that?” More often nowadays, I get in front of platform engineers and developers to talk about what VCF can offer them. This was exceedingly rare until recently. Now it’s much more commonplace.
Did you know that in addition to HCI and SDN, we do infrastructure self-service, DBaaS and full multitenancy? Did you know we are the #3 contributor to the Kubernetes code base? Did you know that the most widely used Java development framework on the planet is owned by Broadcom? Did you know that vSAN now includes built-in data protection?
Anyway, people seem to treat VCF as an a la carte buffet. That’s great, but it’s not ideal. In my patch, we sold a bill of goods based on an improved ROI/TCO in the form of hardware consolidation and other efficiencies with full VCF adoption.
It’s a long game for sure, but I have seen savings on TCO with numbers that have two commas in them! If you do it a la carte, you may end up paying twice for things; no one is happy about that.
Therefore, your end goal should be to adopt all of VCF. Again, no one expects you to do this overnight, but those licenses are sitting there waiting for you. Let’s keep going.
Deepen Your Understanding of VMware Cloud Foundation
Included with VCF is a plethora of training and hands-on options available to you. All of the following are at no extra charge, and some of which you can use even if you don’t have VCF:
- VCF Jumpstart workshops.
- Contact your VMware sales team for these:
- Additional VCF Workshops. I would recommend our architecture workshop first.
- VCF Experience Days.
- Partner-provided training.
- VMware hands-on labs (HOL) are available.
- Subscribe to the official VCF channel on youtube.
- Official VCF training through Broadcom VCF @Learning. This is a big offering here. This is official digital training using official VMware by Broadcom curriculum.
Assess Your Preparedness for VCF with the Private Cloud Maturity and Optimization (PCMO) Tool
Your account team can run our PCMO tool, which includes two reports: the Cloud Maturity Model Assessment, which is publicly available, and a TCO/ROI calculation based on your environment.
The TCO/ROI calculator in particular will calculate both the results for your current environment and also compare against other platforms.
As someone who has experience in cloud economics, these tools are very detailed and transparent. We have experts who can give you deep details on how the numbers are calculated.
Play the Long Game – Plan Hardware Refreshes and Collaborate with Other Internal Teams
I am mostly talking about vSAN here. Nothing will get you a better TCO than switching to vSAN.
If you haven’t taken a look at vSAN in a while, it’s not your dad’s vSAN anymore. vSAN Express Storage Architecture is . . . freaking awesome . . . and it’s worth another look. I have a customer I can’t mention who is doing some really cool stuff with mission critical number-crunching and they use vSAN ESA as their primary storage platform.
Anyway, start thinking about vSAN Ready Nodes. When is your compute refresh coming? Your storage hardware refresh?
Consider getting ramped up to these when the refresh occurs. It’s actually pretty straightforward. All you need is 4 vSAN nodes to get started with a VCF Management domain.
All the while, you can continue to use your existing storage.
Additionally, start talking to your network engineers, your SREs, and your platform engineers. You will need them to help with the NSX implementation.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that VCF appeals to more professionals than just infrastructure engineers.
Use VMware Best Practices
It’s always a good time to clean house and ensure you are following best practices in your vSphere clusters. There are three sets of best practices I would recommend:
- VMware performance best practices.
- The VMware Validated Solutions (VVS) guides.
- The VMware security hardening guides.
This is important because your environment might be a good candidate for VCF Import, which is out now, and recently improved.
Install VCF Operations and Automation
If you are looking to get started right now, the usual place people start is with VCF Operations and Automation. For these, the requirements are simply the capacity to run them; there are usually no hardware infrastructure reconfigurations needed. If you’ve subscribed to VCF, then you can start right away.
The first order of business would be to install Lifecycle Management with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations.
From there you can install any of the VCF Operations and Automation products, which include VCF Operations, VCF Operations for Logs, VCF Operations for Networks, and VCF Automation.
Starting with VCF Operations and Automation and then ramping up to other VCF capabilities such as vSAN and NSX is an approach we call the “Crawl, Walk, Run”.
Use VCF Import
The last recommendation I will make here is to consider using VCF Import. This will allow you to import your existing vSphere or vSphere with vSAN clusters.
That’s right . . . you may very well be able to get started with the full suite of VCF tools right now! The VCF Import tool will actually do a pre-flight check first to see if the cluster can be imported, then, if you so choose, convert or import your existing clusters and they will become VCF Management or Workload Domains.
Consider Collaborative Workshops with Our Architects
If you contact your account team, they can coordinate and run VCF workshops. These are at least 90 minutes where a Solutions Architect and/or a Cloud Architect will discuss in a deeper dive what VCF can do for you. I recommend starting with the VCF Architecture Workshop.
But, there are workshops for every VCF capability.
As you can see, there are a lot of options, but wherever you choose to start, Broadcom has you covered.
