Several firms I have worked with over the last few years have complex, legacy environments with tens of thousands of VMware vSphere® hosts worldwide. It’s common for each application platform to have a dedicated infrastructure, which means capacity constraints. Consuming resources requires many manual and error-prone tasks to build, operate, and lifecycle the virtual infrastructure and manage applications.
The solution is to move to a common IaaS platform with infrastructure that can be leveraged for use cases based on need and deliver a true cloud experience. VMware Cloud Foundation™ (VCF) will do this. However, most of these customers had limited experience building a private cloud, so they turned to VCF Professional Services to help them build an integrated, automated, self-service cloud.
Approach
Architects and consultants from VCF Professional Services worked with the firms through various workshops to understand their business challenges, goals, and use cases. We began with a point of view based on our years of experience. Then, we worked with them on a roadmap to build a private cloud that met their unique requirements and would provide their internal customers with a public cloud experience.
We co-developed the architectures with them and guided them in adding use cases and integration points focused on adoption and consumption. One of the benefits VCF Professional Services provides is integrating enterprise tools and processes and automating the entire VMware stack along with the customer’s ecosystem. Working with the operations teams, we helped them build a platform for their use cases beyond what the standard documentation provides.
In just a few months, we quickly implemented their first minimum viable product (MVP) use case. The quick success lets the customer’s IT team show the value of the work they’ve been doing and leads to the implementation of follow-on use cases. We help the customers understand how to integrate their application platforms into the environment. The firms can then add more use cases, with VCF Professional Services counseling them on their evolving service needs. We also built monitoring solutions by leveraging telemetry, giving them the end-to-end visibility they needed to operate a large environment at cloud scale.
With the help of VCF Professional Services, customers can build infrastructure in days compared to months, and their customers can consume those resources in hours instead of weeks. And they have a fully functioning self-service on-prem cloud.
Their implementations are growing rapidly to meet their business demands, and they have a true cloud operating model. That’s the value of VCF Professional Services. Our Pro Cloud Services help customers integrate VCF into a customer’s internal IT ecosystem, tools, and processes to:
- Rapidly update an existing private cloud or deploy a new private cloud
- Enhance security through hardening
- Manage and operate a new environment at scale
- Free IT staff to work on business-critical tasks
Learn how we simplify and accelerate your full-stack VMware Cloud Foundation environment with VMware Pro Cloud Services.
