You loved SDDC experience on VMC on AWS/AVS/GCVE and looking to implement similar one on your datacenter or you like to host managed private cloud for your customers who like to focus on their business deliverables rather than managing underlying infrastructure?
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) got you covered and it includes the following components with version 5.1.1.
If you are not familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and how it differs from VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), Please refer VMware documentation.
SDDC Manager orchestrates the lifecycle of Management Domain (which hosts management VMs) and Workload Domains. It also does the password & certificate rotations for the SDDC components. Management Domain is deployed first on vSAN (just to minimize the external dependencies) and Workload Domains can be deployed with datastore on ONTAP storage systems. The datastore that gets deployed with SDDC manager orchestration is known as Principal Storage and Other datastore that is provisioned manually or with ONTAP Tools is supplemental storage.
To protect the management VMs using SnapCenter Plugin for VMware vSphere or to expand storage for the Management Domain to host additional VMs required for the workload domains, the datastore can be provisioned with ONTAP Tools.
A Domain can contain multiple vSphere clusters and each cluster can have its own Principal datastore.
NOTE: For Management Domain, the principal datastore is always vSAN (As some of you requested to provide similar options to workload domain, we are working with VMware to correct that). Principal storage is deployed with single storage path and need to include other paths as post deployment task.
Each VCF instance is considered as a Region. As all the management VMs (including the vCenter and NSX controllers of all workload domains) are hosted on Management Domain, to increase the availability, SnapMirror Business Continuity (will be replaced with SnapMirror active sync with ONTAP 9.15.1 onwards) along with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster is utilized to stretch the cluster across two availability zones.
Workload Domains can also utilize that solution to provide option for application hosting in Multi-AZ. Applications can utilize ONTAP caching feature across the AZ or Regions.Each Domain has its own NSX controllers or have option to share the NSX components across the Workload Domains.
Storage networking for the vSphere datastore utilizes the distributed port groups (typically VLAN based). For VM guest storage networks either it can use NSX overlay segments or can use VLAN backed NSX segment. In case of NSX overlay segment, L2 bridge needs to be deployed on NSX Edge cluster to enable communication between the VM network on NSX overlay segment and ONTAP SVM data lifs on storage VLANs.
To provide disaster recovery of workloads, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) along with Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) provided with ONTAP Tools can be utilized to orchestrate the VM replication with SnapMirror async across the regions.
NSX controllers across the workload domains or regions can be federated using Global Managers. By stretching the NSX segments across the regions allows the VM to failover with no IP address change or even migrate selective VMs from one region to another using network file copy.
Adding Cloud gateway to VCF environment, multiple regions can be managed centrally with VMware Cloud Console. Using VMware Cloud Console limits the supported number of Workload Domains. Refer VMware Config Max tool for further info.
With NSX, VPN deployed on Tier 0 gateway or other means of cloud connectivity, cloud native services can also be consumed with VCF environment .
Aria Automation enables users to provide self service catalog of applications that can be deployed to private cloud or any public cloud based on policy definitions. As part of VM lifecycle, for example when a VM is provisioned, data protection policies are set and when VM is decommissioned a backup with longer retention is handled. Aria Automation also has approval workflows builtin when resource is requested above the authorized limits.
VCF Workload Domain can be used for Tanzu or any other Kubernetes distros and provision ONTAP storage & data protection for containerized application using Astra Control. Using Aria Automation pipelines Astra Control operations can be integrated and deployed to Spot Ocean.
Applications in VM or Containers that requires database instances can be handled using Data Services Manager (for Postgres or MySQL) or can use Instaclustr (for PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Apache Zookeeper, Opensearch and Cadence) for your private AI workloads or other kubernetes/vm applications.
Build your Private AI environment with NVIDIA GPUs or Intel AMX CPUs or IBM WatsonX using VCF clusters and assume you might already be familiar that we got DataOps Toolkit to integrate with JupyterLab workspace and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.
Here are some example use cases on VCF with NetApp products. Feel free to ping me (Suresh Thoppay) if you like to have additional info or demos.
- Place VM workloads in single AZ or Multi-AZ targets based on policy definition or user input.
- Automate deployment of stretched workload domain across AZ using SnapMirror active sync.
- Self serve Datastore creation for application owners with ONTAP Tools API
- Option to protect applications (with SnapCenter/SCV/Astra Control) during deployment
- Deploy VMs to Spot Elastigroup across the clouds
- Deploy Applications to Spot Ocean
- Create and manage Ocean Spark along with other VM/containers.
- Instaclustr monitoring with Aria Operations
- Configure Cloud Insight Agents as part of Application deployment
- Deploy Application to AWS with FSx ONTAP
- Deploy Application to Azure with ANF
- Deploy CVO with BlueXP
If you like to integrate by yourself, refer our Solutions page.
