Businesses often struggle with ongoing operational needs like monitoring, patching and maintenance of their VMware infrastructure or the added concerns over capacity management. At the same time, cost efficiency and control are very important. Not all workloads have identical needs and different business applications have variable requirements. For example, production applications and regulated workloads may require strong isolation, but development/testing, training environments, disaster recovery sites or other applications may have lower availability requirements or they can be ephemeral in nature, where a usage-based consumption model makes more financial sense.
We are excited to announce that IBM Cloud® for VMware as a Service is adding a multitenant consumption model. Businesses choosing the multitenant consumption model can now request VMware resources on-demand with no up-front commitment (billed hourly) or take advantage of guaranteed capacity and discounted pricing with the Reserved billing option (billed monthly). The Reserved option requires only a single month’s commitment and can be as low as a single virtual machine.
Since this is an extension of IBM Cloud VMware as a Service built on VMware Cloud Director, it offers a single-pane-of-glass experience to operate and manage your VMware environments, so you can benefit from either single-tenant or the new multitenant option to run your VMware workloads in IBM Cloud.
What is IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service?
IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service is a hosted VMware Cloud Director service that allows the deployment of VMware virtual data centers and virtual machines. The single-tenant consumption model has been in market since 2022, allowing customers to take advantage of the IBM-managed service by the host. IBM hosts and maintains the common management plane in each multi-zone region (MZR), and in the single-tenant model, we provide a variety of dedicated host profile options for your workloads. With this, you can offload the monitoring, patching and maintenance of the management backplane and underlying hardware, with an SLA of 99.99% availability.
The single-tenant consumption model offers the most host profile options, including a range of VMware-certified SAP configurations, and it can guarantee that your workloads do not share the underlying compute hardware with anybody else.
The single-tenant model allows you to right-size your managed infrastructure with the most number of host profiles and storage options to choose from in the market. It is ideally suited for production applications and regulated workloads that require isolation.
With the newly launched multitenant consumption model, customers can spin up new virtual data center environments in less than 20 minutes running on multitenant compute infrastructure. Multitenant IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service supports two new cost-efficient billing models:
- On-demand offers a model with no up-front commitments.
- The reserved billing option offers guaranteed capacity and discounted pricing.
You can also adopt both consumption models and still receive a single, consolidated bill each month.
The multitenant model is ideal for development/testing, training environments, disaster recovery sites, VMware-hosted applications that don’t require strong physical isolation from other workloads, and for any other ephemeral VMware workload needs. With these options, IBM Cloud offers businesses the best possible options for hosting their VMware workloads in the cloud.
Reference architecture for VMware as a Service – Single tenant
Reference architecture for VMware as a Service – Multitenant
Key features
- High availability: IBM Cloud monitors, patches and maintains the VMware management plane (VMware Cloud Director, NSX-T, vSAN, vCenter Server, vSphere, etc.) and underlying hardware to a 99.99% availability SLA. This allows customers to immediately onboard to an existing, highly available and secure management environment, reducing time to value. The management plane is physically separate from customers’ workload clusters, which means workload infrastructure is 100% dedicated to running your applications
- Single tenant: The SDDC management components (e.g., vCenter, NSX Manager) are dedicated to your instance only and are not shared between other customers. Your workloads run on dedicated hardware and have the best isolation from other customers’ workloads for compliance and performance. VMware deployments are elastic, and you can resize them at any time by using a large variety of host profiles.
- Multitenant: Benefit from already available multitenant compute resources on IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service site and spin up new virtual data center environments in less than 20 minutes with cost-efficient consumption models. On-demand billing option with no up-front commitment. Reserved billing option with guaranteed capacity and discounted pricing. Reserved requires only a single month’s commitment.
- Flexible deployment through portal or APIs: You can manage the lifecycle of director sites and virtual data centers by using the VMware as a Service offering. The following functions are supported when you use the VMware as a Service console or REST API:
- VMware as a Service: Single-tenant creation
- VMware as a Service: Single-tenant deletion
- Virtual data center creation
- Virtual data center deletion
- Integrated self-service backup: VMware as a Service provides a natively integrated add-on service to provide backup capabilities to ensure business resiliency. Veeam is a market-leading solution for backup that is integrated into the Cloud Director Console. And you can safely and reliably backup your VMware resources on the IBM Cloud
Next steps
IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service gives you the benefits of simplified VMware management, dedicated instance, compute flexibility and scale to meet your workload demands. Take the next step:
- Make the most of your VMware as a Service experience by reading the docs
- Deep dive into VMware as a Service Reference Architecture
- Learn how to deploy and manage virtual data centers