VMware Cloud Foundation Overview
l will try to put this Content in a way that what I understood about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). I will try to put it as simple as possible, I believe if our Basic understanding of a product is strong you can figure out the advanced parts of it easily.
Let us ask these questions "WHAT" "WHY" and "HOW" this is a Golden Circle. Everyone knows what, Some knows How and few know Why.
What is VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation?
The Name of the product itself speaks about what it is, let's break that for you
- VMware: Name of the Vendor who is the pioneer in virtualization technology and a Dominant Market player in Server virtualization and more.
- Cloud: Is an operation model of an infrastructure, what makes the Public cloud so tempting in today IT world, it's the way which meets our requirement on Demand and the agility what it offers to meet various SLA's.
- Foundation: What are the fundamental components of any IT infrastructure, Compute, Storage, and Networking & Security.
Having said that, now we can put all that together and make a statement out of it.
VMware Cloud Foundation is a product sold by VMware, which provides an experience of a public cloud operational model with the help of virtualizing Compute, Storage, and networking
Why VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation?
This needs some preliminary level of understanding of IT infrastructure, I am pretty sure you do have that, or else you would have closed the browser by now "lol".
I will assume that you are an IT professional, who is managing your VMware Virtual infrastructure.
Let me give you an Analogy.
What is the most difficult part when it comes to a Private cloud
- Initial Designing & Deployment of the infrastructure
- Software Life Cycle management of the infrastructure
- Scale-up and Scale down of the infrastructure.
- Other infrastructure Day 2 operational activity.
If I say all these challenges will be addressed by one single solution from VMware which is VMware cloud foundation (VCF), the Solution itself is an engineered system from VMware which knows the best practices of VMware solution and only allows us to build an infrastructure with VMware Validated designs Only. " when it comes to Engineered Systems, we may lose the customization capability, however, this solution is built on an intensive customer requirement and use cases so we may hardly end-up saying NO or NOT doable to any requirement you have.
VMware Cloud foundation not only automates the initial Deployment phase, but it also helps us in Managing the software life cycle management, you may be wondering why I am empathizing with Software Life cycle Management so much. IT administrators know how much Planning and ground work needs to be done, when we have to perform an upgrade starting from the Hardware compatibility to the firmware and drivers, known issues, we can keep listing the per checks and the activity will also go for weeks or Months depending up the size of the infrastructures. If you have an infrastructure managed by VMware cloud foundation this will be an automated process including downloading the compatible software bundles and Pre-checks with few manual interventions by clicking Next and selecting some checkboxes.
We can automate the scale up and scale down of the infrastructure, in terms of computing/storage and networking, and security with less manual effort and without any impact on the production workloads. Along with that it also provides us the ability to automate some key day-2 operational activities of an infrastructure like replacing the solutions with custom certificates, password management, overall health monitoring of the infrastructure, and providing us a single plane of glass to manage the complete data-center solution.
I don't want to miss this crucial point, Most of the VMware products are hardware-agnostic, and VMware Cloud foundation is a solution that can be built on any Hardware vendor of your choice, which is certified by VMware. Most of the EMO vendors are certified with this solution. And if you are looking for a commodity hardware even that is possible which meets some pre-requisite.
This solution also supports your infrastructure to modernize your application into container technology, along with modernizing your private cloud
Now I think you have a fair idea of What VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is and Why we need VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), what you read here is just a tip of an Ice burg that brought the entire Titanic down ????. As a product, its capability is more and still, it's growing in terms of features and abilities, with every release we speak about.
How is VMware Cloud foundation able to provide all the above-mentioned capabilities?
Now it comes to How. The word how itself comes with curiosity, watching magic can be fun, but knowing how it is performed is curiosity. Let me boiled it down to you
We all are aware, how server virtualization has made our daily operational activities easy and simple. The only reason why we can make it easy and much less time-consuming is because of Server Virtualization. The Virtualization technology decouples the Hardware dependency and allows us to create a machine like a folder creation on a desktop. however only the server virtualization will not give the capability of end-to-end automation as I said earlier, we have three main pillars in Data Center Compute, Storage, and Network & Security. VMware Cloud foundation is a suite of VMware Software Defined DataCenter products, which includes all VMware products to virtualize all the three Pillars
All the below listed are the mandatory solutions and these solution are managed and monitored by a VCF component called SDDC Manager.
- vSphere Suite for Data Center Virtualization
- vSAN for Storage virtualization
- NSX-T for Network virtualization
We have several other VMware solution which is integrated with VMware cloud foundation which is optional and comes along with various license editions.
In my next blog Part-2, we will talk more about License Editions, Deployment types, types of Hardware that can be used.
If you have any queries or need assistance please feel free to reach out to us at info@libvert.com, we are a consulting firm with extensive knowledge and real-world experience in building a data center that meets your demands.