This week we are pleased to release Cloud Director service support for managing multi-tenant SDDC services on Google Cloud VMware Engine and remote on-premises vCenter endpoints. Cloud Director service is available for both VMware Cloud Provider partners and enterprise customers.
What does this mean to partners and enterprise customers? Now you can deliver a multi-cloud control plane for infrastructure and applications to Google Cloud VMware Engine and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as connect existing on-premises vCenter instances or consider replacing your on-premises Cloud Director appliances.
The additional supported endpoints are thanks to a new SLL reverse proxy, whilst the existing VMware Cloud on AWS support and on-premise Cloud Director connections are supported with the same mechanisms as previously supported. As the diagram below shows, Cloud Director service can now manage the same levels of multi-tenancy resources across all these endpoints, meaning Cloud Providers can significantly differentiate their offering locations, quickly and without a different operational model. This new capability is thanks to a highly available and scalable SSL Reverse Proxy service intended to be able to handle hundreds and thousands of individual connections.
Cloud Director service provides a consistent user experience over multiple cloud architectures and genuinely delivers on the hybrid cloud promise. Similarly for Cloud Director supporting on-premises: Providers that use Cloud Director with their on-premises VMware infrastructure deployments can pair with Cloud Director service or decide to consolidate to an all-in Cloud Director service based experience and simplify their Cloud Director usage for multi-cloud and on-premises deployments.
Cloud Director service is the SaaS incarnation of Cloud Director on-premises and delivers the same high value infrastructure and application services but to VMware hyperscale partners, VMware Cloud on AWS and Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as on-premises environments. By doing so, Cloud Providers can multi-tenant these target endpoint infrastructures to provide a right-sized cloud to tenants to meet their requirement. Cloud Providers can sell virtualized resources to differing tenants (customers) and enterprises, typically who are large enough to warrant it or can sell virtualized resources to internal ‘Lines of Business’ (LOB), both with complete segregation and control.
But Cloud Director is not just about multi-tenancy; it is also a service delivery platform with networks, security, storage, application catalogs, extensibility services from a rich partner ecosystem, GPU services and native Tanzu Kubernetes support as well as AWS and Google Cloud native service adjacency. For example, Google customers can now connect their Google Cloud Platform environments to a Cloud Director service instance with Google Cloud VMware Engine environment and gain the benefits of VMware and Google Cloud Platform in the same region.
Cloud Director service delivers on many use cases, not only right-sized virtualized infrastructure for tenants, but also enables very quick and easy geo expansion. Do you have customers who have a global presence and require cloud services in different geos? Now you can expand to Google Cloud VMware Engine regions as well as VMware Cloud on AWS– delivering a multi-cloud experience has never been this simple. You can also connect into your existing on-premises Cloud Director or vCenter instances, delivering a hybrid cloud with global potential.
Use case 1 – Drive economies of scale and attract all customer sizes
Remove your limits on physical hardware and node-based consumption in VMware hyper scale clouds and partners. Using Cloud Director service, you can use resource pools to aggregate virtual resources of any size across physical resources for your tenants or LOB. This allows you to sell to all sizes of tenants / business units and removes the hardware SDDC node limitations from them.
Use case 2 – Operationalize multi cloud with a common control plane
Multi-cloud really means management of multiple clouds. Achieving management at a competitive operational cost can be a challenge when managing each cloud separately. Using Cloud Director service, Cloud Providers and enterprises can deliver a hybrid operating model of VMware, anywhere. Deliver customer infrastructure and access to supported endpoints from a single, brandable, customizable Cloud Director service user interface.
Use case 3 – Deliver a secure multi-cloud experience
It’s a VMware Cloud, just on another supported endpoint. Using NSX-T and layer 2 segregation as well as virtualized edge and distributed firewalling, you can protect your tenants’ and business workloads at layer 2 to layer 7 from exploits and ensure they remain protected with dynamic policies, ensuring east-west and north-south traffic protection. Encryption and other capabilities are also factors that contribute to a secure environment. (Please ensure the target endpoint supports these as not all endpoints are equal in capability.)
Use case 4 – Drive Application Modernization Opportunities
The world is not standing still, and neither are customers’ application requirements, and each target endpoint needs to support a dev ready cloud. Cloud Director natively supports Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and operational management of these. Cloud Director delivers a rich set of CI/CD tooling and applications, wrapped in security, pre-tested and validated and ready for developers to use. You can complement this already formidable capability with hyper scale cloud adjacency from AWS and Google Cloud. This means tenants and customers can utilize native cloud solutions in alignment with their VMware estate, allowing for all sorts of use cases and hybrid application development.
Use case 5 – Deliver extensible, differentiated cloud services
Extensibility is key to delivering a differentiated portfolio to customers, and Cloud Director has a rich ecosystem of third-party ISVs who do just that. At a baseline with Dev ready cloud as an offering, Cloud Providers and enterprises can access the entire VMware Marketplace of applications for their consumers. These applications are all tested and validated by VMware and can be placed into custom curated catalogs as well as third-party ISV solutions and custom solutions, vApps or Helm charts, making an ideal platform to deliver the solutions customers need. With VMware App Launchpad, cloud providers can now expand their support for applications running on their on-premises VCD instances on to GCVE and AWS environments powered by CDS, unifying the application deployment across VMware based clouds.
Use case 6 – Migrate and protect to and in cloud
Cloud Director Availability makes migration and Disaster Recovery as a Service in and to Google Cloud VMware Engine simple. Customers can drive self-serve migration from the on-premises Cloud Director Availability vSphere plugin, or they can run the Cloud Director Availability plugin from the provider managed Cloud Director instance and move workloads into Google Cloud VMware Engine. Once in Google Cloud VMware Engine, customers can protect their workloads between Google Cloud VMware Engine instances or back to on-premises.
How is this all accomplished?
Cloud Director service is available from VMware Cloud Partner Navigator and is supported with VMware Cloud on AWS and Google Cloud VMware Engine endpoints. Cloud Providers and enterprises will need contracts with each endpoint provider and a contract for Cloud Director service as well. Providers and enterprises can purchase Google Cloud VMware Engine directly from Google / VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS from AWS or VMware. Enterprise customers can also purchase the Google Cloud VMware Engine cloud offering from VMware as part of the VMware Cloud Universal program.
Once this is done, it is simple to connect to the SDDC in the endpoints and start delivering resource pools and tenant and business services.
What next?
Find out more about Cloud Director service by visiting our documents page, webpage or talk to your VMware representative. Keep an eye on our blog page for information on Cloud Director Availability support for Google Cloud VMware Engine.
