Overview of VMware Solutions
The IBM Cloud® for VMware Solutions offerings help you extend your existing VMware® virtualized datacenter into the IBM Cloud, or to house cloud native applications.
The solution supports use cases, such as capacity expansion into the cloud (and contraction when not needed), migration to the cloud, disaster recovery to the cloud, and backup into the cloud. With the solution, you can create a dedicated cloud environment for development, testing, training, lab, or production.
Review this information for the design of the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions vCenter Server, whose target workloads require high levels of availability and scalability.
This design serves as a baseline architecture that provides the foundation for other internal or vendor-specific components to be added for specific use cases.
Key benefits of VMware Solutions
VMware vCenter Server® provides the fundamental building blocks, which include VMware vSphere®, vCenter Server, VMware NSX®, and shared storage options, such as vSAN™. These components are needed to flexibly design a VMware software-defined data center solution that best fits your workloads.
By applying advanced automation and single-tenant bare metal infrastructure, you can quickly deploy the entire VMware environment to the IBM Cloud in hours. Then, you can access and manage the IBM-hosted environment through the native VMware clients, command-line interface (CLI), existing scripts, or other familiar vSphere API-compatible tools.
Post deployment, you can add to (and remove from) VMware ESXi™ servers for an instance, add and remove clusters, join additional vCenter Server instances to an existing instance, and add products and services by using the VMware Solutions console. It is your responsibility to monitor and manage the vCenter Server instances.
Your responsibility includes backups, patching, configuration, and monitoring of the VMware software and the underlying hypervisor hardware. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions offers automated solutions to help with the ongoing management and monitoring of the vCenter Server instance.
In addition, IBM Cloud Professional Services and Managed Services are also available to help accelerate your journey to the cloud with offerings like migration, implementation, and onboarding services.
Unlike a managed service offering, vCenter Server gives you full and complete access to all components that allows for a greater flexibility than what a managed service might offer. However, certain constraints apply to allow the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions automation to function, post vCenter Server deployment.
The VMware Solutions offerings bring the following benefits:
- Accelerating delivery of IT projects for developers and lines of business. The time that it takes for procurement, architecture, implementation, and deployment of resources is reduced from weeks or even months, to hours.
- Enhancing security with dedicated IBM Cloud bare metal servers in a hosted private cloud, including the encryption of data at rest. For vSAN storage, encryption of data at rest is optional by using either vSAN or vSphere encryption. For shared file–level or block storage, service–provider–managed encryption at rest is available by default in select data centers or it is optional by using vSphere encryption. You must manage the necessary encryption keys.
- Enabling consistent management and governance of the deployed hybrid cloud by providing full administrative access to virtualization management, thus preserving your existing VMware tools, scripts, and investments in training.
- Using VMware expertise at global scale with IBM Professional and Managed Services spanning 40+ IBM Cloud data centers worldwide.