This article was originally posted here, on 24 August.
VMware continues to accelerate the adoption of cloud services and a multi-cloud world through innovative products. There is no better example of that commitment than the new VMware Cloud Provider Hub, a powerful solution built to dramatically help providers onboard and manage the delivery and management of both VMware and third-party cloud services through a central hub.
New Innovations Fuel a Growing Cloud Provider Platform
The Cloud Provider Hub is a core component of the Cloud Provider Platform. The new solution brings together multi-cloud services and lifecycle controls into a centralized portal for partners to purchase, provision, and manage VMware cloud infrastructure and operations services.
The Cloud Provider Hub is the evolution of the previously-branded VMware MSP Platform. The MSP Platform introduced the ability for Cloud Providers to deliver VMware Cloud on AWS as a managed service. With a growing cloud services portfolio, Cloud Providers need access to more services as well as more consistent controls across these new, multi-cloud services. The new Cloud Provider Hub is designed to fill that growing need, providing a central point, or “hub,” to deliver services, whether on-premises in VMware Cloud on AWS, from the marketplace, or across other clouds.
Simplifying Cloud Complexities with Greater Control and Lifecycle Management
The new VMware Cloud Provider Hub focuses on delivering advanced control and lifecycle management, including a new user interface and revamped API for providers and tenants, a comprehensive support ticket view, granular user and lifecycle controls, and integrated support to ensure consistent delivery of asset-light services.
VMware Cloud Provider Hub’s main purpose is the delivery and management of services, which is why there has been focus on an intuitive user interface and API availability, service lifecycle (add, change, delete), and user access to specific services as well as support.
From a support perspective, all VMware Cloud on AWS services have 24×7 VMware support and providers can log incident tickets as required with VMware. The user interface provides a consolidated ticket view of all their tenant tickets with VMware support in one place. The support tickets are filterable, enabling providers to easily find what is pertinent at the time.
The Provider Console, available through the GUI and API, allows providers to manage tenant’s services and subscriptions, offer partial or fully managed services, ticket management for all services for all tenants, and see a consolidated view of tenant service usage. The billing usage is not included there and is something the provider will do externally. Automatic service activation provides a more integrated workflow within the solution, and granular user controls limit user functions and access.
VMware Cloud Provider Hub tenant console, available via UI and API provides the Provider’s end customer with access to provision or consume services, view their service usage and manage their users.
Two Core Services in Initial Release – But Stay Tuned!
VMware Cloud Provider Hub focuses on two core services for this release—VMware Cloud on AWS and Log Intelligence—with the option for providers to extend their services to marketplace services as well.
- VMware Cloud on AWS partners can extend their managed services portfolio beyond their on-prem VMware deployments into an asset-light VMware deployment in the cloud for cloud migration, data center extension, disaster recovery, regional expansion, or application modernization use cases.
- VMware Cloud Log Intelligence provides real-time visibility into infrastructure and application logs across multiple clouds, private and public. With VMware Log Intelligence, partners can offer monitoring and incident response management service for VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere, vCloud Director, and AWS deployments.
Cloud Provider Business Benefits
VMware Cloud Provider Hub allows Cloud Providers to utilize VMware Cloud Services, providing multi-cloud services on asset light infrastructure that is familiar to their customer’s technologies, and hence de-risks any migration to a separate hypervisor due to disk conversions etc. Utilizing VMware Cloud Services and marketplace services means a provider can easily expand their portfolio, growing an asset light, multi cloud portfolio of services, sticky to customer needs.
The primary benefit of that is cost savings, which is accomplished by cutting operational provisioning time and consolidating management for tenants and providers, with service allocation and controls built into each provided service. Keeping all service lifecycle management in a single console for VMware Cloud Services and future marketplace services allows a provider to easily manage their customers’ solutions. Having public APIs to provide the same functions allows a Cloud Provider to integrate the service management (provisioning, assignment etc) into their business processes, simplifying transactional volumes in business and minimizing errors.
Breaking down silos for horizontal integration is a core focus for the Cloud Provider Hub and this release introducing Log Intelligence helps providers. Utilizing Log Intelligence Providers can start to configure a cross cloud managed service and automation for customers, maintaining a common operational model no matter what cloud the customer runs on. Providers can then utilize their skills in the applications and services to specialize and create unique managed service offerings around customer applications.
Learn More to Simplify Your Multi-Cloud World
There will be many assets and enablement sessions in the coming months. VMware Cloud Provider Hub website is coming soon.
