Announcements
December 7, 2022 By Bryan Buckland
Phil Fritz
3 min read

VMware as a Service is a new managed offering on IBM Cloud that combines IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy with VMware capabilities.

Organizations are turning to the cloud to modernize their infrastructure and applications for VMware workloads. They are not only seeking security, speed and scale, but also want to expedite time to value and lower the complexity and risk of migrating and modernizing mission-critical workloads to the cloud.

To deliver on this mission, IBM Cloud and VMware will now provide a secured, operated and managed service to help enterprises deploy a faster path to migration and modernization. IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service is a new managed offering on IBM Cloud that is designed to help enterprises accelerate their adoption of hybrid cloud.

What is IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service?

IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service (VMwaaS) is an exciting new addition to the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions portfolio. VMwaaS is an IBM-managed service, based on the VMware Cloud Director platform, that allows enterprises to deploy virtual data centers built on dedicated IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers.

Enterprises can deploy their VMware workloads more quickly as they can take advantage of an existing, 99.99% highly available management plane. In addition, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers will be available in multiple host configurations to address various workload requirements, providing enterprises the best of both worlds: quick deployment on dedicated infrastructure and lower overall costs.  

Reference architecture for VMware as a Service

Key benefits

The following are some of the key benefits of IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service:

  • High availability: IBM Cloud monitors, patches and maintains the VMware management backplane 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 the time to value.
    • This backplane is physically separate from customers’ workload clusters, which means your infrastructure is 100% dedicated to running your applications and doesn’t have to also run the management layer.
  • Bare Metal configurations: Customers can select IBM Cloud Bare Metal profiles by CPU, memory and storage that are required to run the targeted VMware workload. These configurations are available at varied granularities to meet customer needs and reduce TCO significantly.
  • Elastic deployments: VMware deployments are elastic, and you can resize them at any time:
    • From 32 to 96 Cores
    • From 192GB to 1.5TB of RAM
    • Option of Network File Storage (NFS) or vSAN
    • Provider-managed encryption keys
  • Single-tenant instance: The SDDC management components (e.g., vCenter, NSX Manager, etc.) are dedicated to your instance only and are not shared between other customers:
    • Start as small as two or more hosts and one or more NFS shares with variable performance options. While other vendors require three hosts minimum, starting with two can reduce your initial expense and allow you to scale out.
    • Network File Storage lets you independently scale out storage without adding additional Bare Metal servers. NFS provides several tiers of performance, allowing you to fine-tune the infrastructure to support your application requirements: 0.25 IOPS/GB, 2.0 IOPS/GB, 4.0 IOPS/GB or 10.0 IOPS/GB.
    • Create one or more virtual data centers though the Service portal or order add-on services. Virtual Data Centers make it easy to allocate charges by department or group.
    • Public network IP addresses.
    • VPN Connectivity with IPSEC/L2VPN.

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

Learn more

IBM Cloud for VMware as a Service (VMwaaS) gives you the benefits of simplified VMware management, dedicated instance, compute flexibility and scale to meet your workload demands.

Bryan Buckland
STSM, IBM Cloud IaaS Solution Architecture
Phil Fritz
Senior Product Manager, VMware Solutions

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