Introducing High Availability on IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service: Enhancing resilience and availability for mission-critical workloads

We are excited to announce the availability of Regional High Availability (HA) networking and workloads on IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service (VCFaaS), to help businesses deploy mission-critical applications with enhanced resiliency and availability. With these new options, you can:

1. Choose to deploy your VMs onto infrastructure that is 99.99% available and managed by IBM in the multitenant model;
2. Build your own Regional Workload HA in the single-tenant model by taking advantage of VMware stretched vSAN feature to stretch your environment across two physical data centers within a region, ensuring that your applications stay up and running even in the event of a data center-level failure; or
3. Deploy Regional Network HA only in both single-tenant and multitenant models.

IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service (VCFaaS) provides a fully managed VMware solution that allows businesses to deploy and manage VMware virtual data centers and virtual machines seamlessly on the cloud, with the support of IBM’s dedicated infrastructure.

• IBM-managed: IBM manages the entire VMware stack for you, so you can focus on your business, not on the complexities of cloud infrastructure. No more worrying about VMware pricing, updates, and changes—IBM has it all covered.
• Flexible consumption options: Choose between single-tenant for more security and isolation and multi-tenant for rapid scalability—each designed to meet specific business needs and budgets.
• Flexible billing options: Pay-as-you-go or reserved pricing models are available, giving you the flexibility to optimize costs without sacrificing performance. Whether you need on-demand flexibility or predictable costs for steady-state workloads, we’ve got you covered.
• Comprehensive compute and storage options: Access a broad range of compute and storage options tailored to your requirements, including SAP-certified hardware for mission-critical workloads.

The High Availability feature in VCFaaS provides customers with the flexibility to deploy workloads in a stretched environment across two data centers within the same region. This feature offers 2 key options:

1. Regional Network High Availability: This option allows you to extend your network across two zones or data centers within the region, providing additional resiliency.
2. Regional Compute High Availability: This option requires stretched networking as well as stretches your workloads across both data centers, via vSAN replication, ensuring continuous operation even if one data center faces a disruption.

By leveraging these options, customers can ensure that their mission-critical workloads remain available and resilient, meeting the stringent availability requirements necessary for mission-critical workloads.

• 99.99% Infrastructure availability: Deploy highly available workloads with confidence in a trusted, stretched environment where IBM manages the underlying networking, storage and infrastructure details.
• Fast onboarding: By instantly deploying to an already built, hosted and managed by IBM work plane, you can save time and take advantage of IBM’s expertise in operating HA environments in VMware.
• Network resilience and scale: With a stretched network, you can distribute network loads across two zones, helping scale resources horizontally for better performance and availability.
• Resilience during disruptions: Regional Compute High Availability ensures that, in the event of a data center failure, your application continues to run uninterrupted, offering zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in seconds or minutes.
• Flexibility: Choose between just stretched networking or both stretched network and workloads, depending on your specific business needs and workload requirements.

• Regional Network High Availability enables you to stretch your Virtual Data Center (VDC) network across two data centers, offering a single logical network that spans both locations. This network is private only, but you can deploy additional HA network edges with public interfaces if needed.
• If you configure HA networks using Datacenter Groups, you can share a dedicated network edge, maximizing cost-efficiency. Plus, additional VDCs can be added without incurring extra costs.
• Ordering an HA network edge is hassle-free, as VCF as a Service automation will deploy an HA configuration at no extra cost.

• Improved Resiliency: For applications that support HA configurations natively (e.g. SQL databases like IBM DB2), a Regional HA Network is the missing piece to achieve HA for your application. Combined with a load balancer, it reduces the risk of overloading the network in a single data center
• Cost-Effective Availability: This comes without much cost uplift - The only extra costs are for an optional load balancer and any network ingress/egress, making this a cost-effective way to enhance availability and resilience.

• With High Availability Compute across 2 data centers, your data is continuously replicated—via a stretched vSAN—ensuring that in the event of a failure, your compute resources can be activated instantly in the second data center.
• Instant Failover: In the event of a failure at the VCD or data center level, the compute in the secondary data center will be powered on immediately. The network automatically redirects traffic to ensure uninterrupted workload operations.
• Zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Stretched vSAN offers zero data loss by constantly replicating data, ensuring that your workloads are protected.
• Low Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Recovery times are minimized to seconds or minutes, with a simple reboot of the VM and application.

• Achieve High Availability without much heavy lifting: Even if your application does not natively support HA, VCF as a Service with stretched vSAN offers an easy and effective way to achieve high availability without having to refactor applications or purchase additional HA licenses.
• Seamless resilience: With stretched vSAN, your workloads are resilient, and in case of a failure, they can continue to operate seamlessly from the backup data center with minimal downtime.

IBM’s VCF as a Service with High Availability allows businesses to deploy workloads with confidence, knowing that the infrastructure is designed to keep applications available and performing optimally, even in the face of disruptions. Whether you need stretched networking for load distribution, or full stretched workloads for comprehensive failover capabilities, VCF as a Service offers the flexibility, scalability and performance you need.

With VCF as a Service and IBM Cloud, you can quickly deploy highly available, mission-critical workloads in a trusted environment, all while benefiting from cost-efficient pricing models and unmatched support.

Experience the future of high availability with VCF as a Service today, and let IBM handle the complexity so you can focus on what matters most—your business.

If you're seeking a reliable solution to host your mission-critical VMware workloads in the cloud, IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service could just be the perfect fit, offering top-tier resiliency and availability.

To make it even easier for businesses to get started with IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service, we’re offering some exciting promotions:

• Getting started: Use the promo code VCFAAS1000 and receive USD 1000 in cloud credits when you start your journey with IBM Cloud for VCF as a Service.
• New client specials: Get up to 50% off when committing to a 1- or 3-year contract
• Low starting prices: On-demand deployments start at under USD 200 per month, making it affordable for businesses of all sizes to scale with ease.

For more details or to begin your journey with IBM Cloud for VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service, reach out to our team today.