Interconnectivity overview
Interconnectivity consists of multiple services and offerings that enable customers to connect from their remote network locations to IBM Cloud® deployments and between workloads and services that run in IBM Cloud.
It can be divided into the following categories:
- Interconnecting with on-premises networks
- Interconnecting VPCs and IBM Cloud services
The following diagram shows an overview of the interconnectivity solutions.
Interconnecting VMware workloads with on-premises networks
Interconnecting VMware workloads on VPC with on-premises networks provides the capability to know how to interconnect workloads with on-premises network.
The solution consists of the following key offerings:
- IBM Cloud Direct Link offerings provide low-latency, high-throughput connections between IBM Cloud VPC networks directly to a service provider-managed WAN, or a client-managed cloud backbone, or through a supported service provider.
- IBM Cloud VPN for VPC can securely connect your virtual private cloud to another private network. This service offers two types of VPNs, such as Site-to-site gateways that connect your on-premises network to the IBM Cloud VPC network and Client-to-site servers that allows clients to connect to VPN servers on the internet.
See the following sections for more detailed overview for these offerings for on-premises connectivity, and architectural considerations when used with VMware workloads on VPC.
Interconnecting VMware workloads with VPCs and IBM Cloud services
Interconnecting workloads with VPCs and IBM Cloud services provides the capability to know how to interconnect VMware workloads that are running on a VPC with other workloads on other VPCs and IBM Cloud services.
The solution consists of the following key offerings:
- IBM Cloud Transit Gateway provisions and defines connections between resources on the IBM Cloud network, providing private interconnectivity between IBM Cloud data centers worldwide. You can connect IBM Cloud VPC, IBM Cloud classic infrastructure, and networks advertised over GRE tunnels on IBM Cloud classic infrastructure. You can also attach IBM Cloud Direct Link to your IBM Cloud Transit Gateway.
- With Virtual Private Endpoint (VPE) for VPC, you can connect to supported IBM Cloud services from your VPC network. To connect, you must use the IP addresses that you choose and that are allocated from a subnet within your VPC. You can use VPEs with your VMware workloads that run on VPC.
When you use the previous services, the data remains within the private IBM Cloud backbone and is optimized for performance.