A Guide to VMware Cloud Solutions

With most businesses running at least one cloud service, it has become essential to understand what cloud offerings (and management tools) are available. In this article, we’ll examine VMware Cloud Solutions and how you can use them.

What are VMware Cloud Solutions? They are a suite of tools that help businesses manage their Cloud computing environments. We’ll get into more details later, but VMware is a leader in cloud computing and its tools are widely used to manage public, private, and hybrid clouds. What makes VMware Cloud Solutions so ubiquitous is that they are vendor-agnostic and make integration very easy.

To fully understand Cloud Solutions, we will first discuss the common types of cloud computing.

Understanding VMware Cloud Solutions

What types of clouds are available?

• Private clouds are used and maintained by a single company. They are usually located onsite or in a company-owned data center. While private clouds offer the most customization and control, they are often more expensive than public clouds.

• Public clouds are what we generally think of as “cloud computing” – a third-party provider owns and maintains the data center and all its equipment. The provider essentially “rents out space” to other businesses. Public clouds are usually the most cost-effective and reliable option, and they have the advantage of outsourcing much of the maintenance.

• Hybrid clouds use a private cloud for some operations (like storing and managing very sensitive data) and a public cloud for others (like providing business software, platforms, and environments to remote workers). They combine the control of a private cloud with the cost-effectiveness and convenience of a public cloud.

When it comes to third-party cloud computing, there are many permutations available. These are all basically variations on the theme of moving something from a physical on-premises location to a managed remote location. For our purposes, the three main types of cloud are:
— SaaS (Software as a Service) is software delivered over the internet, usually on a recurring subscription model. Business standbys like email, instant messaging, and file-sharing applications are good examples of SaaS.

— IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) “is a type of cloud computing service that offers essential compute, storage, and networking resources on-demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis.[…] A cloud computing service provider manages the infrastructure, while you purchase, install, configure, and manage your own software—including operating systems, middleware, and applications.” [Source: Microsoft Azure]

— PaaS (Platform as a Service) “is a cloud computing model that provides customers a complete cloud platform for developing, running, and managing applications […] The PaaS provider hosts everything—servers, networks, storage, operating system software, databases, development tools—at their data center. [… This] enables PaaS customers to build, test, deploy, run, update and scale applications more quickly and inexpensively.” [Source: IBM]

VMware enables virtualized and cloud computing because it supplies various technologies and tools. (For more on VMware and virtualization, see our guide on using VMware). VMware Cloud Services specifically support cloud computing by letting you use one suite of tools to manage a single or multi-cloud environment. Whether you’re using a VMware public cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a private cloud, the tools offer the same experience.

Cloud management is important because you may need to add or change provisioning at a moment’s notice. VMware’s management console as well as its virtualization tools make all this possible. You can also look into VMware Cloud hosting with a variety of third-party partners, like Google and Amazon.

VMware Infrastructure as a Service

Managing an IT infrastructure that can cope with peaks and troughs in usage without under- or over-provisioning is difficult but crucial. Over-provisioning is expensive; under-provisioning creates a time-consuming and frustrating environment for everyone involved. 

When businesses use IaaS, they get the following benefits:

• Cross-cloud capability.

• Rapid deployment.

• Scalability.

• Self-service provisioning.

Moving to cloud-based IaaS is one solution, but managing IaaS itself is a specialized skill; not every team has this capability. This is why VMware’s full-time IaaS support is so important. This team of specialists can not only help IT teams solve thorny technical issues, but they can also help them utilize VMware products to provide the optimal IaaS environment. 

VMware Cloud & AWS

For many businesses, the public cloud approach of handing off all maintenance to a cloud provider is the most appealing and cost-effective option. Let’s look at one such integration between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

When you choose VMware Cloud on AWS, you’re essentially getting the VMware software-defined data center as a service from Amazon Web Services. You can use VMware to run your usual workloads and scale as needed, but you don’t have the hassle of dealing with the infrastructure. This gives you IT flexibility and efficiency with less time spent on maintenance and routine activities.

VMware vs Cloud Suite

The VCloud Suite lets businesses can manage their cloud infrastructure (and thus their virtualized data center, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and so on). Briefly, the vCloud Suite includes:

• vSphere. This is the backbone of VMware. It encompasses the core compliments of their platform and includes the hypervisor (ESXi), vCenter Server (which helps manage virtual machines), and VMFS (the file system that manages how resources are used).

• vRealize Suite, which handles infrastructure automation, performance optimization, capacity management, and compliance. This suite comes with centralized log management and analytics (VRealize Log Insight) and lifecycle/content management (Lifecycle Manager) services.

As mentioned elsewhere in our blog, one of the key benefits of using VMware is that other VMware products integrate seamlessly into the tech stack. So, for example, you could easily add features like network security into your cloud. This reduces much of the complexity of setting up and expanding cloud computing environments.

Now, let’s have a brief look at two types of cloud computing with VMware: IaaS and a managed cloud.

VMware Cloud Solutions with NETdepot

As a verified VMware Cloud partner, NETdepot has proven its expertise in deploying and integrating VMware Cloud products in accord with the company’s design parameters. For our customers, this means a successful and smooth implementation of VMware-based cloud infrastructure and tools. You can read more about our VMware partnership here.