In this opportunity, we will see a series of posts about the advantages of this great technology.
VMware Cloud Foundation is a simple, agile, and secure hybrid cloud platform. Hybrid is the most sought after approach for organizations looking for benefits of the cloud.
Cloud Foundation Technologies
These technologies are the building blocks for organizations to build a software-defined data center, with Cloud Foundation, integrating all these capabilities into a single platform that is easy to consume.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these Cloud Foundation services.
For Compute, organizations most likely realize the benefits of deploying the compute virtualization technology through vSphere. Cloud Foundation is based on vSphere to deliver features such as live migration, predictive load balancing, high availability and fault tolerance, and centralized administration and management.
For storage, Cloud Foundation delivers high-performance and highly scalable storage. This is based on hyper-converged architecture that can support all-flash or hybrid storage and provides data services such as deduplication and compression, data protection, and replication. vSAN, NFS and FC are all valid options.
Cloud Foundation also virtualizes the network. This is the key to achieving the full benefits of a software-defined data center. Without it, network and security services will still be a manual configuration and provisioning process, ultimately becoming the bottleneck to faster delivery of IT resources. By leveraging NSX, Cloud Foundation delivers key features such as distributed switching or routing, micro-segmentation, load balancing, L4-7 networking services, and distributed firewall.
Cloud Foundation has integrated cloud management capabilities to deliver a complete private cloud, out of the box, to automate the delivery of composable infrastructure and app services, intelligent health, performance, capacity, and configuration management, and automated costing and usage metering for infrastructure services across clouds.
Cloud Foundation makes all this incredibly easy to deploy and manage with built-in lifecycle management of the entire stack, automating all day zero to day two operations from deployment, configuration, cloud infrastructure provisioning, and upgrading and patching.
Use Cases
VMware Cloud Foundation’s main use cases include cloud infrastructure, IT automation, hybrid cloud, end-to-end security, and virtual desktops.
IT Automation / IAAS: Rather than installing servers, configuring storage and networking and manually connecting management tools, Cloud Foundation customers can simply provision infrastructure (the full stack of compute, storage, networking and management) automatically and reliably through workload domains. This level of automation eliminates opportunities for human error while greatly accelerating the time it takes to provision ready-to-use infrastructure from weeks to just hours.
Virtual Desktops: Cloud Foundation provides automated deployment of Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure, including User Environment Manager, Unified Access Gateways and App Volumes components for turnkey virtual desktops deployed in accordance with VMware best practices.
Cloud Native Apps: Automated NSX-T Deployments in workload domains is now supported in Cloud Foundation. With NSX-T support, Kubernetes workloads can be deployed, run, and managed through VMware Enterprise PKS within a Cloud Foundation workload domain.
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning: Cloud Foundation leverages GPU support provided in vSphere 6.7 to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
High Performance Computing: Organizations can leverage multi-cluster workload domains to automatically scale out infrastructure to support high performance compute (HPC) workloads. As HPC workloads demand additional capacity, cloud administrators can simply add compute, storage and network resources to workload domains in just a few clicks through Cloud Foundation’s automated workflows.
Big Data: Cloud Foundation supports external NFS and FC storage connectivity for massive data sets typical of Big Data workloads. By combining high performance vSAN storage with massive scale-out external storage, Big Data workloads can leverage the right storage for the right jobs to provide quicker insights into business data.
In the next posts, we will see various configuration topics for this technology. Meanwhile, I leave the following links for you to review:
Cloud Foundation Resource Center
YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/c/VMwareCloudFountation
Hands On Labs
HOL-2044-01-ISM – Modernizing Your Data Center with VMware Cloud Foundation:
This lab is an Interactive Simulation lab. You will gain a better understanding of how VMware Cloud Foundation provides an easier way to deploy and operate a private cloud based on VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture.
HOL-2046-01-HCI – VMware Cloud Foundation – Getting Started:
Discover the capabilities of SDDC Manager for automated deployment, lifecycle management, and automated day ‘X’ operations. Through this lab we will also take a closer look at the integration between SDDC Manager and vRealize Suite.
HOL-2061-01-ISM – VMware Cloud Foundation – Deployment on Dell MX Modular Systems:
This lab is an Interactive Simulation lab. You will gain a better understanding of how to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation on the Dell MX7000 Modular hardware and the advantages that the MX7000 infrastructure brings to the SDDC architecture.