VMware Cloud Foundation overview
VMware Cloud Foundation™ provides a ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform for both traditional enterprise apps and modern apps. VMware Cloud Foundation is based on a comprehensive software-defined stack, which includes VMware vSphere® with VMware Tanzu™, VMware vSAN™, VMware NSX-T™ Data Center, and VMware Aria® Suite (formerly known as VMware vRealize® Suite). It provides a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, network security, Kubernetes management, and cloud management. The VMware Cloud Builder automates the initial deployment of the entire software-defined stack, and after the initial deployment it is managed with SDDC manager. The result is agile, reliable, and efficient. The cloud infrastructure offers consistent operations across private and public clouds.
The IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud provides the underlying infrastructure for running VMware Cloud Foundation in IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers on IBM Cloud VPC provide you with compute capacity provisioned in minutes for your VMware Cloud Foundation deployment. The VMware Cloud Foundation provisioning is done in a similar way that you deploy on-premises. However, it happens in a much more agile way in a secure and isolated virtual network inside your IBM Cloud VPC.
Key benefits
The VMware Cloud Foundation architecture provides you with the fundamental building blocks, which include vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, NSX-T, vSAN, and SDDC manager. The VMware Cloud Builder appliance automates the VMware Cloud Foundation deployment, including the entire VMware software-defined stack. After the initial provisioning, you have the same architecture and user experience as in on-premises VMware Cloud Foundation deployments. Using Aria® Suite Lifecycle Manager (formerly known as vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager), you can deploy more Aria Suite components, depending on the selected VMware Cloud Foundation edition.
VMware Solutions on IBM Cloud VPC has the following 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.
- Provisioning the IBM Cloud bare metal servers on IBM Cloud VPC takes minutes instead of hours when compared to IBM Cloud bare metal servers on IBM Cloud classic.
- VMware workloads by running in IBM Cloud VPC can take advantage of all original functions for IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud (IBM Cloud VPC) networking capabilities and other IBM Cloud interconnectivity services.
With this single-tenant IBM Cloud bare metal server infrastructure that is provided in IBM Cloud VPC, you can quickly deploy network, compute, and storage capacity for your VMware Cloud Foundation to the IBM Cloud.
Unlike the managed service offerings, VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud VPC gives you flexibility to design a solution for your needs, and it provides you full and complete access to all components.
Supported VMware Cloud Foundation architecture models in IBM Cloud VPC
VMware Cloud Foundation supports two architecture models - Standard and Consolidated. You can select your preferred architecture according to the specific requirements of your organization, such as the size of the deployment, the level of scalability needed. Both architecture models are supported for VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud.
In VMware Cloud Foundation Standard, the management and workload domains are deployed on separate sets of physical servers. This architecture is recommended for larger-scale deployments that require more capacity and scalability. The management domain is responsible for managing the overall infrastructure, while the workload domain is used to run specific workloads.
VMware Cloud Foundation Consolidated Architecture combines the management and workload domains on a single set of physical servers. This architecture is recommended for smaller-scale deployments.
In both architecture models, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a unified software-defined data center platform that includes vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and SDDC Manager. The main benefit of using VMware Cloud Foundation is that it simplifies the deployment and management of the software-defined data center infrastructure by providing a single integrated solution that reduces the complexity of deploying and configuring multiple VMware products.
For more information, see Supported VMware Cloud Foundation architecture models.
Supported VMware Cloud Foundation products in IBM Cloud VPC
The following list shows the products that are included:
- vSphere Enterprise Plus
- vCenter Standard
- SDDC Manager
- vSAN Enterprise
- NSX Enterprise Plus
- NSX Advanced Load Balancer
- NSX Distributed Firewall
- Aria Suite Lifecycle
- Aria Suite Enterprise (Aria Operations Enterprise, Aria Operations for Logs, and Aria Automation Enterprise)
- Aria Operations for Networks Enterprise
- VMware HCX Enterprise
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
The following components are not installed by the VMware Solutions automation. However, you can install them separately after the VMware Cloud Foundation instance is deployed.
- NSX Distributed Firewall
- Aria Suite Advanced
- Aria Operations Advanced
- Aria Operations for Logs
- Aria Suite Enterprise
- Aria Operations Enterprise
- Aria Operations for Networks Enterprise
- VMware HCX Enterprise
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid