If one thing’s for certain, it’s that the cloud is massive. VMware’s cloud, specifically, combines 100,000 virtual machines (VMs) over 155+ vCenters and numerous petabytes of storage across six global data centers. Running a cloud of this size presents a number of challenges, including sprawl, ever-present financial constraints and ensuring various business needs are addressed.
With the introduction of VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware’s internal cloud operations team was able to solve two key internal problems. The first: time to market. With Cloud Foundation, VMware’s IT team reduced the time required to deploy new infrastructure by 95% allowing them to stand up new capacity in less than five days. The second was on-going maintenance—specifically, keeping the hardware and software layers synchronized. With so many components in play, even a small change in one element could have cascading impacts across the entire stack.
By figuring out the intricacies of compatibility between various VMware software and the related hardware it runs on, Cloud Foundation was able to provide an approved bundle that VMware’s internal cloud operations teams could then upgrade at their discretion. This allowed the team to manage a huge cloud infrastructure with the same amount of people, lifting a huge burden off of their shoulders.
Beyond that, VMware’s internal cloud operations team uses Cloud Foundation in a number of ways, spanning both the cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). On the cloud side, by using a common infrastructure platform through Cloud Foundation, VMware’s IT team was able to power the different management platforms the company uses internally, such as vCloud Director, vRealize Automation and VMware Integrated Open Source. IT also saw the need to expand VMware’s internal offerings to the public cloud with a hybrid offering, which was put into practice in a Hands-on Lab at VMworld this year. On the desktop computing side, Cloud Foundation was leveraged for the company’s VDI.
You can learn even more about Cloud Foundation and how it supports VMware’s internal cloud operations from a real expert: Anees Iqbal, Sr. Director of Cloud Services Operations. In a short video, Anees discusses how Cloud Foundation improves overall performance and lowers the cost of VMware’s internal private cloud. Watch now! And if you’re interested in learning more about Cloud Foundation, don’t hesitate to register for our Hands-on-Lab, which provides an end-to-end overview of the solution.
