Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

Post Page Advertisement [Top]



During VMworld Las Vegas VMware has announced its partnership with IBM, last week the partnership with Amazon has been announced as well, joining vCloud Air and vCloud Air Networks as a broader Cloud Offering Services.

Just to give you a heads up, this post is not intent to go deeper into technical details, and pros and cons for every each solution, in fact, the idea is to give you a high-level understanding of all these solutions and all the buzzwords around it. Deal ?

Also announce at VMworld Las Vegas, VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware’s unified Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform, targeting private and public clouds. 
Based on a hyper-converged solution, it combines VMware’s industry-leading compute, storage and network virtualization (VMware vSphere, VSAN and NSX) into an integrated solution. But it’s not a simple software bundle that you just purchase and get the same software as if you bought them separately. In fact, the power of VMware Cloud Foundation comes from it’s intelligent and native integrated software stack, VMware SDDC Manager, which automates the design, implementation and life cycle management of the entirely stack.


It was the first available VMware’s Cloud offer, it’s made of an ecosystem of partners, who sells and operates reliable cloud services based on vCloud Director as IaaS, DaaS and DRaaS. As you could imagine with a large number of partners it's not unusual that you find different levels of resources, features, pricing models, and so on among them. This nice search page allows you to find each one them and the services the offer.

It’s basics derives from the same principal and services offered by vCloud Air Network, but on this public cloud offer VMware itself is the one managing and operating it, allowing you to consume cloud resources like Dedicated Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, Disaster Recovery, Government Services, Object Storage and more.


IBM has been the first vCloud Air Network Partner to enable a hybrid cloud solution based on VMware Cloud Foundation, leveraging worldwide IBM Data Center presence, allowing you great flexibility choosing a location near your company, but more interesting, IBM offers a custom portal that allows you to, on-demand, order new vCenters environments, including the provisioning of physical hypervisors, allows the scale-out of physical resources and the life-cyle of this environment. As it provides you dedicated vCenter, you can use all vSphere features and integration that we all know and love. 

This jointly architected solution that integrates the world’s leading private cloud and the world’s leading public cloud, will allows customers to run any application across vSphere based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments and will provide access to the full range of AWS services.
Based on Cloud Foundation too, it offers a nice management portal with pretty much the same capabilities as described in the IBM offer above, but differently this solution is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service.
(available mid-2017)

Now if fo some reason you decided to create your own private cloud on premises, VMware will not leave will behind trying to figure how to integrate all those solutions and ensuring all best practices has been considered by yourself. Thinking about those clients, VMware provides VVD, which is an extensively tested solution path with specific information about product versions, networking architecture, capabilities and limitations, allowing you to build and operate a private cloud, significantly simplify length and complicated design process and shortens provision cycles.  


Nowadays challenge is to manage, monitor and secure your application across multiple, private, public and hybrid clouds leads ensuring identity and access, data security and workload mobility, imagine it’s all possible with a single set of tools that you already know from a central location, well that what Cross-Cloud is all about, eliminating all your operational challenges through a range of Cross-Cloud services.

 
Now the inevitable question…. Which one is better to me ?
There’s no simple answer for that, and the most spoken sentence comes to play.... "it depends" !!!

My best advice is to make your own homework, trying to identify the variables to this equation.
- what are my companies' business objectives;
- what are my technical requirements; 
- which offer allows workload mobility;
- which offer prevent vendor lock-in;

Once you start building your final list of candidates you will then come to cost aspect of it.
But I have no doubt on my mind that whatever your needs are you will find within VMware the perfect fit for your business.

Good (extensive) reading...

Bottom Ad [Post Page]