VMware Cloud on AWS

Extending Your Data Center to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management

In my first blog of this five-part series I discussed 5 Ways to Boost Your Hybrid Cloud Management. In my second blog I walked through Low-Cost Cloud Migrations, and in this third blog I’m going to dive deeper into extending your data center to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management. Of course you can continue to benefit from your data center investments, although many organizations are also looking to benefit from the advantages public cloud offers that cannot be cost-effectively delivered with today’s traditional data center environment. The winning combination of vRealize Cloud Management with VMware Cloud on AWS is helping customers operationalize a hybrid cloud strategy and receive consistent infrastructure and consistent operations with self-service automation, governance, and operations.

In recent research conducted by Management Insight Technologies, respondents said:

“A single management model helps reduce IT operating costs, increases developer productivity, improves IT service delivery and business response, and speeds up the feature releases.”

If you prefer to read about the research and this five-part blog series now, you can find the complete story of what will be discussed in our eBook: 5 Ways to Improve Managing Your Hybrid Cloud.

Extending Your Data Center

If you’re investigating your options of extending your data center to VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some examples of why organizations want to adopt cloud beyond their data center perimeter.

• Expand footprint or to new locations: Obtain capacity for new projects to support the business, or expand into new geographies, by extending the data center to the cloud instead of building new data centers or investing in over-provisioning of existing resources.

• Access capacity on demand: Handle unplanned, temporary, or seasonal capacity needs without having to build larger, permanent on-premises infrastructure that would be capable of always handling the maximum volume of traffic while also incurring the capital expense of maintaining the spare capacity.
• Provide flexible test, development, lab or training environments: Reduce the strain of on-premises resources for application updates, service park installs, and test sand boxes by moving them to the public cloud instead of continuously creating and destroying environments.
• Extend application modernization to your premises: Flexibly develop new cloud applications that need to integrate with on-premises applications or extend on-premises applications to access native cloud services.
• Enable remote workforce: Enable remote workers and alleviate travel restrictions by provisioning Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in the cloud.

In addition to these use cases, the Enterprise Strategy Group conduced research known as the Hybrid Cloud Trends Survey, and respondents said this:

86% of organizations expect to extend or re-use
existing on-premises security and governance tools, practices, and policies
as they adopt public cloud services

Challenges of a Extending Your Data Center to Cloud

The examples listed above are all good reasons to adopt a hybrid cloud approach. Although, you probably already know that integrating the public cloud with your existing data center infrastructure can be challenging. Organizations might face many technical, process, and skills differences required to leverage both environments simultaneously. This means you should consider the following:

• Mismatched architectures between on-premises and cloud environments
• The need to rearchitect and refactor applications for public cloud infrastructure
• Incompatible hypervisor, networking, storage and management stacks
• Differences in operational model and inability to leverage established on-premises governance, security and operational policies
• Complexity of using multiple management tools to manage on-premises and cloud environment
• Increased costs, risk and complexity of hybrid cloud management
• Inability to leverage different tools, IT skill sets, operating and security models
• Disruptions in business processes and operations due to lack of efficient IT troubleshooting mechanisms for a hybrid cloud environment

How To Ease Extending Your Data Center to the Cloud

vRealize Cloud Management can help ease extending your data center to the cloud as it covers the spectrum of IT operations, from design to the migration of applications. For example, teams may want to resize and standardize existing applications before moving them to cloud. In cases where they are deploying new applications in the extended data center, teams may wish to set up controls and resource limits before they provision and deploy new applications.

This is a good time to suggest reading our new eBook called Realize Your Journey to the Cloud that guides you through different phases of your journey to VMware Cloud on AWS. Also, it’s a good time to mention the Enterprise Strategy Group research again. Respondents said this:

54% of IT managers and executives view
public cloud management of infrastructure services
as more difficult than on-premises

3/4 of respondents prefer
an integrated hybrid cloud management solution
from a single vendor

If you’re someone who prefers an integrated hybrid cloud management solution, let’s jump right into the technical capabilities that can ease your journey. To affordably extend data centers running modern or new applications, vRealize Cloud Management includes comprehensive capabilities for Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 actions, including the following:

Day 0: Plan and Assess

• Discover apps and map dependencies for end-to-end network visibility and troubleshooting. See how in the video Application Discovery Integration with vRealize Network Insight Cloud and read our whitepaper Gaining Application Visibility.
• Establish controls with resource limits per project/user group. In this blog about New Resource Limits in Cloud Assembly you will see methods for controlling CPU, memory, and storage utilization within a Cloud Zone that is assigned to a Project.  
• Automate provisioning and apply governance across on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS plus set up a self-service portal. Learn more about a modern self-service hybrid cloud with DevOps in the vRealize Automation Cloud on VMware Cloud on AWS solution brief.

Day 1: Migrate and Monitor

• Monitor the state of the VMware SDDC and cloud objects from applications to infrastructure with built-in and custom dashboards. In this video you can see more about how to use a custom ROI dashboard that covers the total cost of ownership, potential savings, and optimization costs with vRealize Operations Cloud.
• Build provisioning templates to deploy, configure, orchestrate, and on-board your workloads, apps, VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and namespaces for consistent automation. Learn more in this blog about Integrating Tanzu Mission Control with vRealize Automation Custom Resources. Plus, you’ll find this blog interesting about DevOps for Infrastructure – Iterative Blueprint Development with GitOps.
• Automate compliance checks for VMs, Host, vCenter, and vSwitches based on today’s latest industry standards, such as PCI, HIPPA, DISA, FISMA, ISO, and CIS, with six out-of-the-box templates. Also, consider creating your own custom compliance templates as discussed in this webinar about Data Center Security and Automating Compliance with vRealize Operations Cloud.

Day 2: Operationalize

• Troubleshoot the performance, bottlenecks, metrics, events, logs, and flows of your hybrid cloud. In this video you can learn more about proactive intelligence and troubleshooting with VMware Skyline and vRealize Operations Cloud so the environments you manage stay stable, resilient, and secure. Also, read more about customers who used VMware to solve real problems with vRealize Operations Troubleshooting Workbench.  In addition, see how to gain unified visibility across VMware Cloud on AWS by monitoring logs in real time, securely and efficiently in this overview video about vRealize Log Insight Cloud on VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Optimize your environment by reclaiming wasted resources. With vRealize Operations Cloud, you can see which VMs are identified as reclaimable and, which, if addressed, can free up capacity to run additional workloads that provide business value. The system automatically identifies powered off and idle VMs, VMs with old snapshots, and orphaned disks. Read more in this overview blog discussing Managing Your VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Operations Cloud. If you’re curious, read this eBook Want to Cut Risks to Your Business? Go Zombie Hunting! to learn about research that says zombies exist in enterprises at levels up to 45% and how you can find them with vRealize Cloud Management.
• Rightsize virtual machines (VMs) provides actionable recommendations for addressing oversized and undersized VMs. This improves performance and optimizes capacity by focusing on resource usage analysis based on historical trends. To learn more about how to do this in your hybrid cloud environment, read our blog Rightsizing VMs with vRealize Operations.

You can see that vRealize Cloud Management offers a lot to help optimize your hybrid cloud environment. If you’re interested in seeing all these capabilities in action, take a look at three videos from Cloud Field Day 9 that show how to operationalize VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management, including planning and migrating, managing applications, and self-service hybrid cloud.  You might even want to try the capabilities yourself in our hands on lab Operationalize VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management.

Examples of Customers Achieving Success

IHS Markit is a customer that was already using VMware vRealize Automation to deliver self-service infrastructure to its developers via private cloud. They wanted to take that a step further by giving them a platform-as-a-service option on public cloud. The company decided to use VMware Cloud on AWS to extend its on-premises VMware vSphere environment into the AWS cloud and use VMware vRealize Automation Cloud for multi-cloud automation and governance.

“With VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize Automation Cloud, we can provision and manage infrastructure the same way, whether it’s on public cloud or private cloud. That’s enabling us to fundamentally transform how we run IT.”

Kory Grinberg, director of infrastructure and automation at IHS Markit

In addition, IHS Markit gains visibility and enables consistent operations across clouds with VMware vRealize Operations. The self-driving operations incorporate AI and ML to deliver real-time analytics and actionable recommendations that help the IHS Markit team proactively plan, scale and optimize its clouds.

Summary

When the game changes, those of us at VMware are here to help you adapt. vRealize Cloud Management with VMware Cloud on AWS empowers your organization with complete control and flexibility to navigate through your data center extension initiative.

To make it easier, VMware uniquely offers our customers the flexibility to choose consumption options of on-premises and SaaS, along with a hybrid subscription of both in a single license. It’s called VMware vRealize Cloud Universal.  It enables you to adopt a cloud-first model at your own pace while protecting existing investments as well as flex for data center extension and during uncertain cloud adoption schedules.  If you would like to see more, request a demo.

In my next blog we’ll dive deeper into the application modernization initiative discussing a new application build out and hybrid applications.

For the complete story, download our eBook so you have all the information we’ll cover in the five-part blog series in one place.

If you’re interested in moving ahead, you can request a vRealize Operations Cloud trial, engage in a vRealize Operations Cloud hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts.

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