Managing your data in VMware Shared
As of 28 March 2024, VMware Shared is not available for new deployments and support for existing instances ended on 28 February 2025. As of 4 March 2025, all VMs are powered off and on 6 April 2025, all customer and management data will be deleted. To avoid permanent deletion of your VMware Shared backups and to migrate your VMware Shared resources to IBM Cloud® for VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service, open an IBM Support ticket by 6 April 2025. For more information, see End of Support for VMware Shared deployments.
Review the following data storage, high availability (HA), and disaster recovery considerations for IBM Cloud® for VMware Solutions Shared.
Data security
VMware Shared supports data storage in the form of:
- VMware Cloud Director virtual machine (VM) instances
- VMware Cloud Director customer media uploads
- VMware Cloud Director customer templates
- VMware Cloud Director independent disks
- Veeam® backups
All VMware Cloud Director data is stored in multitenant datastores where the datastores are secured by VMware Cloud Director. A significant portion of VMware Cloud Director security, especially in protecting cloud tenants from internal threats, comes from the security of the underlying virtualization layer. It includes VMware vSphere®, the additional security of VMware Cloud Director, and the security of the ESXi™ hosts themselves. The VMware Cloud Director abstraction separates different organizations from each other. Different organizations cannot modify or see each other's organizations data at rest or data in motion.
VMware Cloud Director data storage uses IBM Cloud Infrastructure Endurance File Storage for Classic, which is encrypted at rest to Endurance File Storage for Classic specifications. When VMware Cloud Director data is deleted, it becomes available for reallocation where it is then zeroed out and instantiated for the next use case.
Veeam service backups are to both IBM Cloud Infrastructure Endurance File Storage for Classic and Cloud Object Storage for longer term storage. When the first VMware Shared virtual data center is created, a unique encryption key is generated for each customer organization. It is used to encrypt all Veeam backups for that specific customer's organization. The encryption key is not stored and is unavailable to IBM. After the VMware Cloud Director Data Center is deleted, all backups are deleted, and cannot be recovered.
High availability and disaster recovery
The VMware Shared management service is initially only offered in the IBM Cloud NA South and Europe regions. Recovering from potential disasters that affect an entire location requires planning and preparation.
- You are responsible for understanding your configuration, customization, and usage of the service.
- You are responsible for enabling your VMs or virtual applications (vApps) to participate in the provided backup service.
- You are responsible for being ready to restore all instances of your VMs or vApps used in the service in the restored location or new location.
High availability
VMware Shared supports HA of the VMware Cloud Director service itself. The service achieves HA automatically and transparently by using the Multizone region (MZR) feature that is provided by IBM Cloud.
However, you cannot configure workloads that are running VMs and vApps in an HA manner across multiple IBM Cloud data center sites. VMware Shared currently allows workloads to operate in only one IBM Cloud data center site.
Use VMware Shared with vCenter Server to achieve HA. You can deploy vCenter Server in multiple IBM Cloud data center regions.
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery can become an issue if an IBM Cloud location experiences a significant failure that includes the potential loss of data. Because MZRs are not available across locations, you must wait for IBM to bring a location back online if it becomes unavailable. If underlying data services are compromised by the failure, you must also wait for IBM to restore those data services.
If a failure occurs, IBM might not be able to recover data from database backups. In this case, you need to restore your data to return your service instance to its most recent state. You can restore the data to the same or to a different location, including a VCF for Classic - Automated instance.
Your disaster recovery plan includes knowing, preserving, and being prepared to restore all data that is maintained on IBM Cloud.