Supported VMware Cloud Foundation architecture models
VMware Cloud Foundation™ supports two base architecture models - consolidated and standard. You can select a model according to the requirements of your deployment and organization. If you plan to deploy a small-scale environment and extend it according to your needs, or if you work on an SDDC proof-of-concept you can select a consolidated architecture. For a production environment, you can implement a standard architecture according to VMware's production best practices.
Consolidated architecture model
In this model, the management and customer workloads run on a shared management domain. The environment is managed from a single VMware vCenter Server®. VMware vSphere® resource pools provide isolation between management and customer workloads. Resource pools must be properly configured as the compute capacity is shared between the management and compute workloads.
Initial cluster in the management domain hosts includes VMware vCenter Server, NSX manager cluster, SDDC manager, and NSX edge nodes. VMware NSX edge™ deployment is a separate workflow, but in IBM Cloud VPC, it is done through the Terraform and Ansible automation as part of the initial provisioning.
Standard architecture model
Currently, the offering does not support the standard architecture model.
With the standard architecture model, the management workloads run on a dedicated management domain and the customer workloads are deployed in separate virtual infrastructure (VI) workload domains. Each VI workload domain is managed by a separate vCenter Server instance, which provides for scalability and allows for autonomous licensing and lifecycle management.