VMware Cloud Foundation overview
VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC provides a ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform for both traditional enterprise apps and modern apps. IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud provides the underlying infrastructure for running VMware Cloud Foundation in IBM Cloud and VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC automation deploys the required infrastructure assets inside your own IBM Cloud® account.
The VMware Cloud Foundation deployment provides a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, network security, Kubernetes management, and cloud management. It includes VMware vSphere® with VMware Tanzu™, VMware vSAN™, VMware NSX™ Data Center and it is managed through vCenter Server, SDDC manager, VMware HCX™, and VMware Aria® Suite (formerly known as VMware vRealize® Suite). The VMware Cloud Foundation management capabilities offer consistent VMware operations across private and public cloud deployments. The VMware Cloud Foundation solution provides access to a unique set of VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities in a bundled form.
VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC automation provisions the required underlying infrastructure components in your own IBM Cloud VPC, which is under your own control. The IBM Cloud bare metal servers for IBM Cloud VPC provide you with compute capacity provisioned in minutes. By using IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud as the underlying infrastructure, the deployment happens in an agile way inside a secure and logically isolated virtual network by using a private IP address space that you can define.
The VMware Cloud Foundation provisioning is done in a similar way that you would deploy on-premises, where the VMware Cloud Builder is responsible for the initial start of the entire software-defined stack. The combined deployment process is handled by VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC automation. Post VMware Cloud Foundation provisioning, you can manage the environment by using SDDC manager, vCenter, and NSX manager - the same tools and interfaces you would use on-premises. Adding or removing compute capacity is done by using VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC automation.
Key responsibilities
VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC is a self-managed solution. This means that the VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC automation provisions a new VPC, prefixes, subnets, several security groups, a public gateway, and the required bare metal servers for your VMware Cloud Foundation deployment, and an IBM Cloud DNS service instance. For day two of operation, you are responsible for monitoring and managing the VMware vCenter and NSX, including backups, patching, configuration, and monitoring of the VMware software and the underlying vSphere hypervisor. You can use SDDC manager to update your VMware Cloud Foundation environment, or add extra functions and capabilities, such as other Aria Suite components by using the deployed Aria Lifecycle.
Key benefits
The VMware Cloud Foundation architecture provides you with the fundamental building blocks for a software-defined data center. These blocks include VMware vSphere, vCenter Server, VMware NSX, VMware vSAN, and SDDC manager to manage your VMware Cloud Foundation deployment. The VMware Cloud Foundation automation and the VMware Cloud Builder appliance automate the deployment of the entire underlying infrastructure and VMware software-defined stack and you have the same architecture and user experience as in on-premises VMware Cloud Foundation deployments.
IBM Cloud provides VMware Cloud Foundation licensing and gives you access to a unique set of VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities in a bundle.
Review the following VMware Solutions for IBM Cloud VPC key benefits:
- IBM Cloud VPC gives you the ability to easily and rapidly define and control a virtual network, which is logically isolated from all other tenants. The logical isolation is implemented by using virtual network functions and security that is built into the platform. You can freely select the private IP address space that is used in your VPC.
- Provisioning the IBM Cloud bare metal server on IBM Cloud VPC takes minutes instead of hours when compared to the IBM Cloud bare metal server on IBM Cloud classic.
- VMware workloads by running in IBM Cloud VPC can take advantage of all functions for VPC networking capabilities and other IBM Cloud interconnectivity services.
Unlike the managed service offerings, VMware Cloud Foundation for VPC gives you flexibility to control, manage, and update the solution based on your needs, and it provides you full and complete access to all components.