The Cloud industry continues to move forward at such a fast pace, it’s sometimes challenging to keep up.
What if a VMware Cloud Provider could seamlessly automate a multi-tenant cloud platform along with providing comprehensive lifecycle management of the underlying cloud infrastructure?
With VMware vCloud Director (vCD) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), this is possible. In this blog post, we will talk about some of the technical capabilities along with the introduction of a refreshed technical white paper.
Why VCF and vCD?
Previously, VCF and vCD have been laser-focused on specific use cases:
- vCloud Director does an incredible job with providing a multi-tenant layer to infrastructure and services
- Cloud Foundation streamlines the instantiation and lifecycle management of a VMware software-defined data center (compute, storage, networking, and security). In vCD terms, this would be considered the provider VDCs (pVDC) that extrapolates out to organization, or tenant resource objects.
One of the questions that frequently comes up is how can a provider utilize vCD and VCF in unison while fitting into VCPP? This is why we are introducing VMware Cloud Foundation for Cloud Providers. In this post, Luis Ayuso provides an introduction into the VCF subscription program for VCPP.
Previously, VCF was not widely available inside of VCPP. As of today, this is an available product inside of our flexible, consumption-based model.
Benefits of vCD with VCF
- Increased business agility – rapid deployment, management, and operationalization of both shared and dedicated private cloud resources.
- Security and policy-based control – when using vCD with VCF, NSX integration is a native function of vCloud Director. From an intuitive user interface (UI) or extensible API, a provider or tenant user can automate distinct virtual network and secuirty services.
- Reduction in capital and operational costs – by automating the cloud and infrastructure layers from a Day 1 and Day 2 perspective, we can be more efficient in delivering resources on an on-demand basis. I would state that everyone struggles with upgrades and verification of interoperability. When using VCF SDDC Manager, the administrator utilizes a single package for upgrading vSphere, NSX, and vSAN.
- Comprehensive VMware Platform – using the new VCF for Cloud Providers licensing model in VCPP, a Cloud Provider can consume vSphere, NSX, vSAN, HCX, and the specific VCF components (SDDC Manager + Cloud Builder) in a subscription model.
To visualize this, we have a design that looks like the following –
Updated Design Guidance!
Previously, we had a VCF with vCD white paper that was rather outdated. To update this paper, we established a cross-functional VMware team that has tested and validated the latest versions of VCF with vCD. We demonstrated the technical feasibility of implementing both of these solutions for a cloud provider and tenant administrator. While this is a continued work in progress to provide additional deployment guidance, we want to provide our Cloud Providers an updated white paper along with discussing the viability of these complementary solutions.
What’s Next?
This white paper reviews the viability and overview of each of the respective solutions along with how this integrates into the VMware Cloud Provider Program. By no means is this effort completed – there are efforts underway on providing further documentation (deployment guides, reference architectures, etc.) while evolving both VMware Cloud Provider Pod and VMware Cloud Foundation.
In the interim, please do review this newly updated white paper and reach out with any feedback. I can speak for the entire team here: we are all excited to see how this can continue to evolve the Cloud Provider Platform while benefiting all.
