Top 10 reasons to run VMware workloads on IBM Cloud

Back in 2016, VMware and IBM entered into a strategic partnership to provide clients with access to a turnkey, native VMware environment in IBM Cloud’s data centers (located on every continent outside of Antarctica!). VMware customers are able to “lift and shift”—and ultimately, transform —their environments on-premises onto the IBM Cloud without needing to refactor their applications and workloads. Over the past four years, IBM has created a number of unique solutions for VMware workloads, and I want to highlight the most compelling value propositions.

1) Hypervisor and full administrator access

VMware Solutions on IBM Cloud provides customers with full bare metal and hypervisor access and full administrative access to vCenter, PSC, NSX, and any add-on service. Customers deploying their VMware environment in IBM Cloud possess the same control, security, and functionality as they do with their on-premise environment. IBM provides a completely native VMware environment, requiring no changes to existing tooling or processes. The only difference is that it is consumed in a Cloud model.

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2) Multiple SDDC configurations and hardware options

We understand that customers have different requirements, and we embedded flexibility into our solution. Customers have the choice of two automated software-defined data center (SDDC) configurations—VMware vCenter Server (VCS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)—which are automatically provisioned in hours at data centers around the globe. Within VCS and VCF, customers can tailor the environment to their workloads because we offer six different compute options, nine RAM options, and two storage types (vSAN and NFS), providing over 100 different choices.

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3) Bring your own license (BYOL) support

Customers have invested a significant amount of resources and money into their VMware licenses. Acknowledging the business implications, we allow customers to BYOL their VMware licenses, which are automatically provisioned with a VCS and VCF environment. We support BYOL for vCenter Server, vSphere, NSX, and vSAN.

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4) Customer-managed

Understanding that customers have their own practices, we designed VMware Solutions on IBM Cloud to be customer managed, enabling users to utilize the same processes and management that they are utilizing on-premises. This means that customers are not forced to install patches and updates, and since they manage their environment, they can use additional tools like vRealize AutomationvRealize Log Insight, and any solution. VMware Solutions in the IBM Cloud is an extension of a customers’ on-premise environment.

5) Multiple storage options

Some workloads run better on different storage types, so we wanted to provide robustness and choice to ensure that we deployed the optimized storage for the customers’ workloads and applications. Customers can choose vSAN All-Flash, Endurance File Storage, and NetApp ONTAP Select. Customers consuming Veeam and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (our backup solutions) will soon be able to use IBM Cloud Object Storage.

6) Security and compliance

Recognizing that security is one of the biggest causes for hesitation in Cloud adoption, we designed our VCS and VCF solutions to alleviate these concerns. Our VCS and VCF are hosted on single, dedicated environments, which eliminates the “noisy neighbor” effect and data corruptions from other tenants. VCS and VCF also integrate industry-leading security solutions, such as Intel/HyTrust, F5, and Fortinet. HyTrust provides data sovereignty and encryption, F5 enables gateway load balancing and uniform security policies, and Fortinet allows consistent security policies between on-premise and IBM Cloud.

7) Disaster recovery and backup solutions

Customers expect uptime 24/7/365, and with the growing threats of cyber attacks and natural disasters, maintaining uptime with backup and disaster recovery solutions has become essential. We recognize that having a resiliency strategy is now a necessity. VMware Solutions on IBM Cloud has three resiliency tools: Zerto (disaster recovery), Veeam (disaster recovery and backup), and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (backup), which enable customers to reduce downtime. These offerings are hypervisor-based solutions. By exposing our hypervisor, customers have access to the native advanced features and functionalities of these solutions. IBM Resiliency provides managed services for Veeam and Zerto.

8) Network backbone and geographic reach

VMware Solutions for IBM Cloud is available at 30+ data centers worldwide. Once a customer has deployed an environment in the IBM Cloud, they can secure through our private network backbone replicate and migrate their workloads to other IBM Cloud data centers for free. Our unmetered private worldwide network backbone enables unmatched connectivity, as users can easily migrate workloads between their deployed environments. For example, if you have a production environment and a backup environment in another data center, the daily/weekly rate of change would be completely free, saving the customer a significant cost.

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9) VMware expertise

IBM and VMware have been partners for decades, and throughout the years, IBM has cultivated extensive expertise on VMware. We have over 1,000 VMware Certified Professionals and business partners who can provide managed services for VMware Solution in IBM Cloud if a customer prefers to have their VMware environment managed. IBM Cloud was first to market delivering a VMware Cloud Foundation in the Cloud, and IBM Cloud was recently awarded the VMware 2017 Partner of the Year Award, highlighting our VMware expertise and innovation.

10) Migration made easy

We combined our VMware vCenter Server (VCS) and VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) in VMware vCenter Server with Hybridity Bundle, allowing customers to get the flexibility of VCS and the migration capabilities of HCX. HCX allows customers to create an abstraction layer that will enable them to migrate and modernize their on-premise environment to the cloud without changing IP or MAC addresses. We have other migration tools, such as Zerto and NSX, which allow the customers to choose a migration solution that fits their workloads best. If you need assistance with migration, IBM Migration Factory offers a service where we work onsite to design, plan, and migrate your environment into the cloud.

VMware Solutions on IBM Cloud provides an extension of the customers’ on-premises VMware workloads in a flexible and saleable cloud model.

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