What is VMware Cloud Foundation?
VMware Cloud Foundation is an integrated software platform incorporating a full range of software-defined services into a single platform that can be deployed in an on-premises private cloud or run as a service in a public cloud. It offers a simple path to the creation of a hybrid cloud, eliminating the complexity often associated with setting up and managing an enterprise hybrid cloud environment.
Why use VMWare Cloud Foundation?
An increasing number of businesses are choosing the cloud over traditional on-premises IT solutions. While having everything run on-premises is maintaining the status quo for some businesses—and makes them feel more confident about security—the cloud makes for easier and faster innovation, offers greater flexibility, and helps shift costs from a Capex-intensive to a more Opex-intensive model. Public clouds give developers the ability to create, test, and deploy new application code quickly with reduced IT operations involvement. Migrating some applications to the cloud makes a great deal of sense to achieve new levels of agility and flexibility.
Consequently, many enterprises and SMBs try to build and manage a hybrid cloud environment with their existing data center infrastructure and operations tools and the tools provided by one or more of their public cloud service providers, only to encounter major challenges. First and foremost, application development and deployment remains a slow and costly process as they need to re-write, re-architect, or re-factor applications to support portability. Plus, there are many other parts and pieces that they need to consider including versioning, patching, orchestration, and monitoring. To solve these problems and make the creation and operations of a hybrid cloud environment simpler, VMware developed VMware Cloud Foundation, which, as the name implies, is a foundation for an integrated hybrid cloud solution.
VMware Cloud Foundation is a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) built on a market-leading infrastructure platform combined with a cloud management solution that incorporates compute (VMware vSphere), networking (VMWare NSX), storage (VMware vSAN), and management services through the SDDC Manager interface.
VMware Cloud Foundation offers a simple path to the creation of a hybrid cloud environment by using a common platform for both private and public clouds, eliminating any problems with compatibility. This also makes for a consistent operational experience. The same tools and processes can be used on both the public and private clouds, so there is no need to bring in new staff or for existing staff to learn new processes and procedures. The unified SDDC platform is an enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for public and private clouds.
Key features of VMWare Cloud Foundation
- SDDC is run on an industry-leading hypervisor
- Provides flash performance with enterprise-class storage services
- Simplifies network management
- Offers higher levels of security through micro-segmentation, distributed firewalls, compute-level encryption, and storage-level encryption for data at rest
- Incorporates automated lifecycle management
- Allows policy-based provisioning to simplify resource allocation
- Available with flexible deployment choices including on-premises through multiple hardware partners, as a software deployment on vSAN ReadyNodes and networking switches, or as a service through leading cloud providers (AWS, IBM, or VMWare vCloud Air)
Benefits of VMWare’s hybrid cloud solution
A hybrid cloud solution powered by VMWare Cloud Foundation offers enterprises several key benefits:
The platform incorporates automated lifecycle management, which makes for rapid deployment, configuration, upgrading, and patching of all solutions in the VMware stack through SDDC Manager. This radically simplifies operations and eliminates labor-intensive tasks. Productivity is multiplied through the automation of these time-consuming processes.
VMware Cloud Foundation also helps enterprises reduce CapEx and OpEx, offering savings of up to 45% on more traditional approaches.
While enterprises may be apprehensive of moving applications and databases to the public cloud, the solution offers end to end security for all applications through network-level micro-segmentation and encryption for data in transit and at rest.
Businesses that take advantage of VMware Cloud Foundation can run any application in a public cloud, including VDI workloads, web apps, and databases—in any location—without experiencing compatibility issues.
In short, VMware Cloud Foundation is a proven platform that offers a simple path to a hybrid cloud with enterprise-class security, guaranteed interoperability, reliability, and excellent scalability, and offers enterprises the opportunity to realize considerable cost savings.
