Cloud Service Solutions

This is a guide on cloud service solutions.

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Understanding the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing, frequently referred to simply as "the cloud," represents a paradigm shift in how organizations and individuals access and utilize computing resources. At its core, cloud computing delivers on-demand computing resources over the Internet, providing users with access to a wide array of services and infrastructure without the need to own or maintain the underlying physical hardware. This model has fundamentally transformed the way businesses approach information technology, offering flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that traditional on-premises infrastructure often cannot match.

When discussing computing resources in the context of cloud computing, it is important to understand the breadth of what this encompasses. These resources include a diverse range of services such as email platforms, website hosting, database-driven applications, servers, network infrastructure, and various forms of data storage. These examples represent just a fraction of what organizations might require when establishing a comprehensive IT infrastructure. The challenge for many organizations is that building and maintaining such infrastructure demands significant capital investment, specialized expertise, and ongoing operational resources that may not be readily available. Cloud computing addresses this challenge by allowing organizations to access these resources through networking and Internet protocols, effectively leasing capacity from providers who have already invested in robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure.

The fundamental concept underlying cloud computing is elegantly simple: organizations that need IT infrastructure but lack the budget or expertise to build it themselves can instead leverage the infrastructure of established providers. These providers have already made substantial investments in data centers, hardware, software, and the personnel required to maintain them. Through a pay-as-you-go model, customers can access these resources on demand, paying only for what they actually use. This approach eliminates the need for large upfront capital expenditures and allows organizations to focus their resources on their core business activities rather than on managing IT infrastructure. Access to cloud resources is available from anywhere with an Internet connection, making it exceptionally fast, convenient, and accessible.

Key Principles Characterizing the Cloud Model

Several fundamental principles distinguish the cloud computing model from traditional IT infrastructure approaches. Understanding these principles is essential for appreciating how cloud computing delivers its benefits and why it has become such a transformative technology.

Resource pooling represents one of the foundational principles of cloud computing. This principle involves aggregating physical resources from multiple systems into shared pools that can be dynamically allocated to users as needed. Consider, for example, a data center environment containing thousands of physical hard drives. Through resource pooling, these individual drives can be combined into what appears to users as a single, massive storage resource. When a user requests storage, they receive a portion of this pooled capacity without needing to know or care about which specific physical drive or server their data resides on. This same principle applies to memory, network bandwidth, and processing power. All of these resources can be pooled together and then allocated in smaller units to meet individual user requirements, creating tremendous efficiency and flexibility in resource utilization.

Hardware virtualization is another critical principle that underpins cloud computing. This technology presents to users what appears to be dedicated physical hardware, when in reality, the resources are being allocated from pooled infrastructure. For instance, a user might request a virtual machine with two processors. Depending on availability and configuration, this request could be fulfilled from a cluster of systems containing dozens of processors, or it might be satisfied by a single powerful physical processor that can handle the workload. From the user's perspective, the virtual machine behaves exactly as if it had two dedicated processors, submitting requests and receiving responses just as it would with physical hardware. The underlying physical infrastructure remains abstracted and managed by the cloud provider, allowing for more efficient utilization of resources while providing users with the computing power they require.

Elasticity refers to the cloud's ability to dynamically scale resources up or down based on demand. This principle ensures that organizations can add more resources when needed and release them when they are no longer required, providing tremendous flexibility in managing workloads and costs. Automation is another key principle, enabling users to submit requests for resources such as virtual machines or websites and have those requests fulfilled automatically, often within minutes or even seconds. This automation eliminates the need for manual intervention and significantly accelerates the provisioning process. Finally, metered billing ensures that users pay only for the resources they actually consume, which is particularly valuable for organizations with limited budgets. Rather than investing heavily in infrastructure that may be underutilized, organizations can align their costs directly with their usage, paying only for what they need and nothing more.

Cloud Service Models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Cloud computing services are typically categorized into three primary service models, each offering different levels of abstraction and management responsibility. Understanding these models is essential for selecting the appropriate approach for specific organizational needs.

Infrastructure as a Service, commonly abbreviated as IaaS, represents the foundational level of cloud services. In this model, the cloud service provider is responsible for providing and managing all hardware resources, including the physical infrastructure and storage systems. The provider maintains the lower-level components of the technology stack, while users are responsible for installing and maintaining their own operating systems and applications. This model is particularly valuable for organizations that lack physical servers but need computing resources to build their own solutions. Once the physical hardware resources are available, users can create virtual machines, install operating systems, and deploy applications according to their specific requirements. Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) serves as a prominent example of this service model, offering users access to scalable computing capacity in the cloud.

Platform as a Service, or PaaS, represents the next level of cloud services, building upon the foundation provided by IaaS. In this model, the cloud service provider is responsible not only for the hardware resources but also for the operating systems, development frameworks, and control structures necessary to support application development and deployment. Users of PaaS services need only install and manage the applications they wish to build and host, as the underlying platform is provided and maintained by the service provider. The Windows Azure platform exemplifies this model, offering a comprehensive environment for developing, deploying, and managing applications. It is worth noting that many cloud providers offer multiple service models rather than being restricted to just one. Within Windows Azure, for example, users can already have virtual machines running and need only install their specific software, making it particularly useful for development environments that require multiple physical servers with development tools already in place.

Software as a Service, or SaaS, represents the highest level of cloud services, where the cloud service provider is responsible for providing and maintaining the entire operating environment. This includes the infrastructure, operating systems, and applications, all of which are delivered to users through a user interface, typically a web browser. Users simply log in to access their resources and are responsible only for entering and managing their own data. Salesforce.com exemplifies this model, offering a database application that is already fully operational and maintained by the provider, with users responsible only for the information they input. This model provides the greatest level of convenience and simplicity, as users need not concern themselves with any technical aspects of the underlying infrastructure or application management.

Cloud Deployment Models: Private, Public, and Hybrid

Organizations can choose from several deployment models when implementing cloud computing, each offering different levels of control, security, and flexibility.

A private cloud is owned or leased by a single organization and generally resides within that organization's own secured infrastructure. This model allows organizations to leverage virtualization technologies within their data centers to maximize computing power from potentially underutilized servers. Private clouds provide tremendous scalability and can offer significant cost savings by enabling organizations to provide additional services to their branch offices or other locations without deploying physical infrastructure at each site. Instead, these locations can subscribe to services from the central data center much as they might subscribe to a public cloud. All computing resources reside within the data center and are accessed by internal users over an intranet or possibly an Internet connection, but the services are used exclusively by the internal organization.

A public cloud represents the opposite approach, wherein anyone on the public Internet can outsource hardware, infrastructure, software, or any other computing resources. The service provider manages all aspects of the cloud environment, and users simply subscribe to the services they need. Billing is typically handled on a pay-as-you-go basis, with charges determined by usage. Public clouds are accessible to anyone and offer the advantage of requiring no infrastructure investment or maintenance on the part of the user.

A hybrid cloud combines elements of both private and public clouds, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of each. An organization might have a private cloud in place but find that it does not meet all of its needs. By combining private and public cloud resources, the organization can access what is necessary from the private cloud while supplementing with additional resources from the public cloud. This coordination might be managed by a cloud broker, which does not own the resources but simply coordinates them, or by a federated cloud provider, which owns resources and combines them with those of other providers. Regardless of the specific approach, a hybrid cloud represents a mix of private and public resources designed to meet an organization's complete requirements when neither model alone is sufficient.

Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers a multitude of benefits that can address many of the challenges organizations face with traditional IT infrastructure. Understanding these benefits and the challenges they address is essential for evaluating the suitability of cloud computing for specific organizational needs.

Cost-effectiveness stands out as one of the most significant benefits, as organizations pay only for the resources they actually use. This eliminates the need for large capital expenditures on infrastructure that may be underutilized. Reliability is another key benefit, as cloud providers typically maintain very robust infrastructure with high availability and redundancy. Scalability allows organizations to effectively access as many resources as they need, scaling up or down based on demand. Availability ensures that resources are accessible 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Elasticity provides flexibility to add or remove resources as needed, while efficiency enables quick and easy access to powerful computing resources.

Availability challenges can be resolved through cloud characteristics such as service on demand, which provides timely, self-service functionality. Users can log into the provider's website from anywhere with Internet access and perform whatever tasks they need. Cloud service providers can also provide automatic access to computing resources when needed and from any location, which is particularly valuable for developers. Applications can be developed with specific computing resource requirements already specified, and the cloud provider can automatically assign the necessary resources based on those specifications. This eliminates the need for clients to explain their resource needs to service providers, submit requests or proof of concepts to gain access to more resources, and deal with unnecessary paperwork and lengthy lead times that traditionally accompanied capacity additions.

Broad network access allows clients to access computing resources through a network connection from any location, regardless of device type. Location-independent resource pooling means that clouds pool resources, whether physical or virtual, and dynamically assign and reassign them as necessary. When a particular resource is underutilized, it can be reassigned to something that is overutilized, balancing the overall workload. Pooled resources can range from storage and memory to network bandwidth and virtual machines, with any type of resource capable of being pooled and dynamically allocated.

Flexibility challenges can be resolved through cloud computing's elasticity characteristic, which offers the ability to quickly and easily accommodate changes in demand. For example, when creating a website, it is often difficult to predict the volume of traffic it will generate. Elasticity makes it possible to access additional resources easily, at any time, and in any quantity required, allowing the number of servers hosting the website to be increased within minutes.

Efficiency challenges can be resolved through cloud computing's virtualization and monitoring characteristics. Virtualization allows hardware resources to be consolidated and pooled, enabling dynamic allocation where needed, often automatically. This increases hardware resource utilization efficiency while also improving flexibility and availability. When systems or resources are found to be underutilized or overutilized, the dynamic management capabilities of virtualization can address these issues automatically, allocating additional resources where they are needed and taking them from where they are not. Metering can track efficiency, allowing providers and customers to monitor which resources have been used, for how long, and for what purposes. This provides a comprehensive understanding of the cloud environment, which is invaluable for determining whether additional resources are needed or whether some can be returned to reduce costs.

The Software-Defined Enterprise

The increasing prevalence of virtualization is enabling entire enterprises to move toward what is referred to as a highly virtualized state, which essentially means using everything related to IT as a service that can be subscribed to. This transformation involves several key components that together create a software-defined enterprise.

A virtual workspace is used to manage access to all services, applications, and data across all types of devices. These workspaces allow organizations to assign particular applications to particular devices for accessing particular services, all managed as a single unified environment. A hybrid cloud is typically involved in this transformation, combining private and public cloud resources to extend the data center into the public cloud. This extension is necessary when a private cloud solution alone cannot meet all organizational needs, such as when additional access to applications is required that a public cloud provider can supply.

A software-defined data center essentially virtualizes everything in the data center, including management and automation of tasks related to storage, availability, compute resources, networking, and security. All of these elements become virtualized, creating a layer of abstraction between the hardware and the applications and services available. When examining a software-defined data center, the process involves using an open architectural approach to extend the cost and operational benefits of virtualization to the entire data center infrastructure. This goes beyond simply virtualizing virtual machines to include virtual computing, virtual networking, virtual security, virtual storage, and effectively everything else. Automation is frequently used to comply with business requirements, ensuring that as services or applications are requested, automated responses are in place to meet all business requirements related to compute resources, networking, security, and storage without manual intervention.

In a hybrid cloud, management, planning, network, and security models are typically extended seamlessly from the private data center into the public cloud. This combination of internal and external services enhances support for both existing and future applications. It often includes the requirement to support mobile users, offering flexibility and management for mobile workforces and multidevice users who work both inside the internal organization with desktop computers and frequently travel using strictly mobile devices. Moving toward a highly virtualized environment and implementing software-defined enterprises and data centers involves many considerations, but the result is a very flexible, easy-to-access environment where users can access all the services they need in a simple, organized fashion, regardless of their location or device.

IT as a Service (ITaaS)

IT as a Service, or ITaaS, is an emerging approach that can be described as an IT business and operating model. In this model, IT effectively becomes a service provider, referring to the organization's own internal IT department. The IT department offers and orchestrates internal and external IT services, providing self-service access to internal and third-party services through an integrated service catalog. This approach optimizes the production and consumption of services, specifically focusing on meeting business requirements.

The ITaaS approach incorporates all of the typical cloud platforms—Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service—but goes beyond simply offering these services. In a traditional IT department, the focus tends to be on infrastructure: what hardware is available, what hardware is needed, what applications are available, and what applications are needed. This focus operates at a much lower level compared to what the end user or business user requires. IT as a Service is meant to reverse this approach, focusing on what the end user or business user requires and what services they need, then determining ways to provide those services. IT becomes the service provider, incorporating whatever means are necessary to satisfy business requirements, rather than assuming a particular infrastructure is needed and building services that users may or may not need.

The ITaaS transformation should focus on business users, the applications and services they need, and the user demands that must be met for them to accomplish their jobs. Several questions should be answered to help with this transformation. Which services are required by business users or developers? Is internal IT suited to deliver these services, or might an external provider be more appropriate? Would the costs generated internally be competitive with what could be obtained from a public provider? In what ways should processes and policies be changed to support these services? The answers to these questions can help determine the delivery models and platforms that should be used, which might include any combination of private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, virtualized environment, or even a classic dedicated environment using existing infrastructure. The key is to start with the users and work backward, rather than starting with infrastructure and building up to produce a solution that may not be appropriate.

VMware Private Cloud

Defining the VMware private cloud involves the same types of technologies found in any cloud environment, where users can subscribe to services effectively provided by someone else. In this case, however, the provider is the organization itself, hence the term "private." The private cloud resides entirely within the organization's own structured infrastructure and is dedicated to a single organization. While it is not a publicly available cloud provider, the approach is identical. The private cloud provides on-premises access to virtual computers, applications, hardware, and infrastructure, and can deliver self-service, automation, resource pooling, usage control, elasticity, and flexibility—all the components of a public cloud—while being maintained entirely within a single organization.

A typical private cloud implementation might involve an organization with a single, very centralized large data center where all infrastructure resides, along with several smaller branch offices or regional locations. Rather than outfitting these other locations with their own hardware and infrastructure, they access the services of the central data center. Users at these locations access their virtual machines, applications, and other resources from the data center in the same fashion as a public cloud customer would access services over the Internet. The setup is essentially identical to any other cloud environment, with the distinction that it is used exclusively by the organization itself.

VMware offers the vSphere private cloud, which is built and run by leveraging the software-defined data center architecture. This involves taking the existing data center and applying a software-defined approach so that all resources can be pooled and allocated to each location on demand as deemed necessary. The private cloud can deliver highly available applications and services, improve efficiency, enhance business and IT agility, help control costs, control availability and placement of applications, and provide a unified management platform so that everything can be managed centrally.

The VMware cloud suite is used to build and manage a VMware vSphere-based private cloud, with integrated products included in the suite used to achieve this. It is not a single application but a collection of applications that are integrated with each other to produce the private cloud. These products are designed to work together to provide infrastructure virtualization, disaster recovery and testing automation, and overall cloud management of the on-premises vSphere environment. For organizations that determine a private cloud is the more appropriate solution, VMware vSphere and vCloud Suite help achieve that goal.

VMware vCloud Suite Overview

The VMware vCloud Suite includes both infrastructure and cloud management platforms along with several other integrated products that help manage and maintain a private cloud. Understanding the components of this suite provides insight into how private cloud environments are constructed and managed.

The infrastructure platform components include VMware vSphere, which serves as the primary server virtualization platform, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, which provides disaster recovery automation. The Site Recovery Manager is a policy-based disaster recovery solution that allows administrators to control which types of recoveries are implemented in which types of environments, and it also supports virtualized application testing. The cloud management platform components include VMware vRealize Operations, which provides IT operations management typically used to monitor performance, identify and solve issues, and troubleshoot problems. Unified IT management provides overall configuration management for the entire environment and allows for policy-based automation, enabling administrators to create policies that determine automated responses when particular service requests or other events occur.

Additional platform products include VMware vRealize Automation and vRealize Business. vRealize Automation provides a self-service environment for users, creating a personalized experience where they can request applications or services on their own. From the administration side, it enables policy-based infrastructure and application provisioning, allowing administrators to determine which applications are available to which users, in which regions, from which devices, and from which areas. vRealize Business provides costing automation, usage metering, and service pricing models, allowing organizations to maintain virtualized infrastructure while having a clear understanding of costs based on usage. Together, these components help keep all elements of the private cloud under control and management while providing the most simplified experience for end users.

Benefits of VMware vCloud Suite

The VMware vCloud Suite provides numerous benefits, with the reduction of expenses being perhaps the most pertinent to any organization. The suite enables the creation of a much more efficient environment with a standardized and consolidated data center and intelligent, policy-based IT operations. Organizations can reduce capital expenses by up to 49 percent and operational expenses by up to 56 percent, representing substantial cost savings.

Beyond cost savings, the suite delivers increased agility across the overall environment, with rapid provisioning of infrastructure, applications, and IT services. The time to market for new IT services is reduced from weeks to literally minutes in most cases, significantly increasing overall productivity. The suite also provides far greater control through high availability for planned migration, eliminating the need to take systems down during maintenance and upgrades. Business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities greatly reduce downtime for applications, servers, clusters, and even entire data centers, protecting against failures at every level. Policy-based governance and compliance monitoring ensure that organizations remain in compliance with laws and regulations, while service costing and usage metering help make better decisions regarding cost benefits. Organizations can increase uptime of tier 1 applications by 30 percent and reduce disaster recovery management costs by 50 percent, achieving huge savings in expenses, far greater control, flexibility, and agility, and a much more manageable environment with less effort and expense.

Features of VMware vCloud Suite

The VMware vCloud Suite offers a comprehensive set of features that address various aspects of private cloud management and operation. Powerful server virtualization provided by the vSphere component offers tremendous savings at both capital and operational expense levels. With far less hardware and infrastructure to manage, organizations avoid the capital investment in infrastructure and benefit from reduced operational expenses due to lower maintenance requirements, particularly physical maintenance.

Disaster recovery automation enables recovery at half the cost of traditional implementations, and because it is automated, the entire process can be achieved with a single click. Disaster recovery can be expanded to all virtualized applications, not just a single virtual machine, and recovery plans can be tested in an isolated network regularly without disruption. Entire environments can be duplicated in a test environment that is completely isolated, allowing thorough testing without disrupting regular organizational services.

Automated delivery in vSphere environments enables self-service provisioning, allowing users in other departments to request access to new applications and virtual machines on their own without submitting requests. Infrastructure and application blueprints can be maintained for reuse in additional environments. Policy-based governance allows administration to determine what is available, where, and what configurations must be maintained across the entire environment. Intelligent resource management enables vSphere to determine when particular applications or virtual machines are underutilized and allocate resources to areas that are overutilized, balancing usage, power distribution, and all required resources such as CPU, memory, and disk space.

Intelligent operations in vSphere environments include capacity management, analytics, and smart alerts that help identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues. Thresholds can be set for performance monitoring, and customizable dashboards provide real-time visibility into the environment. Policy-based automation enables automated solutions for particular services or applications. Greater business insight is provided through automated infrastructure costing, usage metering, and user consumption reports that can be provided to any department, division, or individual user, showing what was used and enabling accurate cost tracking and infrastructure management.

VMware vSphere

For organizations that determine a private cloud is the best solution, VMware vSphere is the server virtualization platform for implementing a private cloud. vSphere offers the powerful server virtualization needed to create necessary virtual machines and organize and distribute workloads across them. It enables efficient storage by pooling storage technologies together and allowing virtual machines to access that storage. High availability is provided through multiple redundant virtual machines in cluster configurations, ensuring that a server is always available. Network services can be virtualized, allowing administrators to define which virtual machines reside on which networks and which need to be isolated from others. Platform automation tasks can be created for consistent, repeatable processes whenever requests come in, such as for new virtual machines where construction, installation, and configuration can all be automated.

Consistent management is achieved by including the operations manager component, which allows oversight of every component of the private cloud. Intelligent and automated operations make vSphere a very adaptive product that knows where resources need to be allocated and where they can be drawn from. It offers a robust security engine and allows configuration of various cloud APIs into the environment, providing end users with choices for how they want to access services, applications, and virtual machines available in the private cloud solution.

Components typically used to build the private cloud include VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter Server, vShield, vCloud Director, and vCenter Chargeback. ESXi is the hypervisor itself, residing between the physical hardware and the virtual machines that need to access that hardware. It provides the overall virtualization foundation. vCenter Server provides a centralized management environment for all operations, resource provisioning, and performance evaluation of virtual machines. vShield provides endpoint protection against viruses and malware for virtual machines and helps increase performance by offloading scanning to a dedicated appliance. vCloud Director is a software solution that enables enterprises to build secure, multitenant private cloud configurations by pooling infrastructure resources into virtual data centers. vCenter Chargeback is a tool for calculating costs, allowing organizations to know what to charge any particular section, department, or organization for services used, which is useful for maintaining service level agreements.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager

vCenter Site Recovery Manager is a disaster recovery management solution that provides automated orchestration in response to a disaster, eliminating the need to manually invoke recovery processes. It allows for nondisruptive testing of recovery plans, which is critical because organizations need to know if their plans will work. Many organizations never test their plans, but because Site Recovery Manager maintains a completely replicated environment from a primary location to a secondary location, a failure of the primary can be simulated to trigger the recovery process and verify it will work in the replicated environment without stopping services or manually taking anything down.

Site Recovery Manager can be integrated with vSphere replication, the process of duplicating virtual machines from one location to another, and also supports various array-based replication products through VMware partners. It can handle storage replication, so if virtual machines are separate from storage, that can be replicated as well. Benefits include reduced disaster recovery costs, typically with no disruption of service, meaning no lost time. It is hardware and application independent, so specific hardware or software licenses are not required; it simply replicates virtual machines, and whatever they are running on and whatever applications they are running will migrate to the other systems. Recovery plans can be configured quickly, usually in minutes, requiring fewer human resources and further reducing costs. Automated execution means failures are detected automatically, triggering the process without manual intervention. Cloud services can also be used for disaster recovery, so organizations without a second physical site can use a cloud-based implementation as their secondary site.

Key features include VM-centric, policy-based storage and replication. This means focusing on replicating the virtual machines themselves, with policy-based storage and replication allowing administration to control what is accessed in terms of storage, how, where, and what is replicated. In a typical scenario, virtual machines running at a primary site on physical servers access separate or detached storage. If the physical servers fail but storage is fine, virtual machines can migrate to the recovery site and still access the same storage, assuming the workloads of the original virtual machines. If necessary, storage can also be replicated to the recovery site so that virtual machines need only be replicated and see the same storage even though it is a replicated copy.

Recovery plans can be centralized and managed from anywhere, and self-service, policy-based provisioning can be offered so that any section of the organization needing to implement recovery can do so independently. Administration can control through policies what will be provisioned, but users can still request it on their own. Nondisruptive testing ensures the plan will work without taking everything down. Automated disaster recovery failover detects failures and triggers the process automatically, while also supporting planned migration and disaster avoidance. Planned migration allows decommissioning physical servers to be scheduled, with everything migrated to new servers at any time. Disaster avoidance allows proactive movement of everything to a secondary site if, for example, a hurricane is approaching the primary site. Automated failback ensures that when the original site comes back online, everything that moved to the secondary site automatically fails back to the original location, with everything exactly as it was before the disaster or recovery.

vCloud Networking and Security

At the core of most cloud implementations are virtual machines, which offer all the applications and services an organization might require. Just as in an internal organization, these virtual machines need to be networked and need their security managed. vCloud Networking and Security provides networking and security functions for virtualized environments, offering various services through virtual appliances such as virtual firewalls, load balancing, Network Address Translation, and DHCP. These are just examples, as the solution can also integrate with third-party solutions to offer a comprehensive framework for networking and security needs.

The solution offers a broad range of services in a single package, including firewall services with intuitive firewall rules using vCenter and vCloud Director objects and multiple interfaces for any number of network segments. Network Address Translation can be enabled through a flexible NAT engine for public-to-private translation. For external users needing access, a secured IPsec site-to-site VPN can be created, allowing access to virtual systems in a secured fashion. Secure Sockets Layer can be implemented for remote access, configuration, troubleshooting, and management tasks. Load balancers can be implemented to provide server load balancing, increasing availability and handling performance requirements. Edge High Availability provides stateful, highly available firewalls for virtual data centers, protecting the environment. Data security includes VMware vCloud Network and Data Security for Microsoft Windows if needed. Virtual Extensible LAN, or VXLAN, provides the ability to stretch across multiple clusters and various layer 3 segments, creating a dynamic and robust routing environment with software-defined networking configurable through software interfaces. The vCloud ecosystem framework uses standards-based APIs and allows third-party solution providers to integrate their products, offering familiar and comfortable environments for users configuring these solutions.

vRealize Operations

VMware vRealize Operations, or vROps, is a platform that provides intelligent operational management of the overall cloud environment. It simplifies and automates the management of all applications and infrastructure across virtual, physical, and cloud environments. It operates at the highest levels and manages almost every component of the environment, helping improve performance, avoid business disruptions, and improve the efficiency of managing and maintaining complex infrastructures and application services.

Functions and benefits include intelligent operations that are adaptive and learn what is normal in the environment to identify and resolve issues. Self-learning tools, predictive analytics, and smart alerts allow analysis of trends to see where things are going and determine whether resources might run out. Smart alerts can be configured with various thresholds to inform about particular issues with anything that needs monitoring. Policy-based automation allows administration to configure how things should be handled using either out-of-box or customized policies. These typically deal with vSphere security hardening and maintaining compliance of both virtual and physical infrastructure, offering compliance toolkits to enforce conformity with policies. Administrators can determine what the environment configuration should look like and implement automated scripts to enforce compliance, ensuring that no physical infrastructure or virtual machines leak outside of policy.

Unified IT management provides an open and extensible platform with various third-party management packs that can be installed to help manage things not normally included in the VMware environment, such as mobile devices running a mix of operating systems. Comprehensive visibility allows access to applications, storage, networking, and hardware from a centralized console, and it can help provide integrity of disaster recovery plans. It is essentially a high-level utility for managing and controlling every aspect of the environment, centralizing everything into a single console for managing any component of the cloud infrastructure.

Providing Agility Using vRealize Automation

One of the significant benefits of implementing vRealize Automation is the greater agility that can be achieved. With vRealize Automation, faster deployments and management of applications and services are possible. Policy-based governance allows administration to determine that any application or service made available must be compliant with particular policies, and as long as policies are implemented correctly, any application or service released will be compliant. Logical application modeling supports full life-cycle management, including initial deployment and release, updates and upgrades, and decommissioning. Release automation helps keep multiple application deployments in sync, ensuring that appropriate applications are deployed at the appropriate time to the appropriate environments.

Benefits of vRealize Automation include tremendous agility through complete automation of IT service delivery. Tight control can be maintained through policies, quotas, and service-level agreements controlled by administration, ensuring that regardless of the service offered, it is always in compliance with implemented policies. Broad multi-vendor, multi-cloud support and an extensible design provide choice, avoiding limitation to a particular subset of applications or services. High efficiency improves delivery of IT services, helping lower costs in every aspect of the environment. Being flexible and agile, responding to changes quickly and easily, and avoiding huge expenditures of time, money, and resources on manual solutions are among the key benefits.

vRealize Business

vRealize Business enables improved business-to-IT alignment, addressing the common situation where the IT environment identifies needs and recommends implementations while the business side is concerned with costs and benefits. It offers transparency into the quality and cost of IT services, allowing the IT organization to demonstrate the value of an IT solution. It can be obtained as part of the vCloud Suite or vRealize Suite, or as a standalone edition. vRealize Business manages the business aspects of private and hybrid cloud environments, reducing operating and capital expenses. It allows building views of current infrastructure costs, mapping costs by infrastructure components, and creating consumption patterns for various elements, demonstrating where money is being spent.

Service quality management includes reports, analysis, and performance statistics, making it easy to demonstrate current service quality and potential improvements from new solutions. Comprehensive options in the management platform include detailed graphical representation, private and hybrid cloud data collection, and metering and costing features. The easy-to-understand interface allows gathering information to present to the business, showing current spending and potential spending. Cost modeling allows creating different possible solutions, forecasting how things might look moving forward, and budgeting and IT benchmarking to run current infrastructure through processes to output an action plan. Demonstrating IT benchmarks, budgeting concerns, forecasts, and various models helps align IT and business so both can see eye to eye on what a solution requires, its benefits, and how it can be achieved.

VMware Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud solutions are typically implemented when organizations want or need to transform their IT infrastructure in new ways to meet business needs, particularly when growing businesses cannot satisfy organizational needs with current infrastructure. This allows extension of on-premises workloads into the cloud, combining on-premises services and cloud services into a single solution. VMware offerings to facilitate this include VMware vCloud Air and vCloud Air Network Service Providers.

Organizations use hybrid clouds to leverage the benefits of a hybrid strategy, scale as the business grows, increase flexibility to pay for what is used, and access IT services without directly supporting the IT. Businesses want to offer additional products and services at a reasonable cost, and when existing infrastructure cannot meet demand, acquiring additional infrastructure can be significantly costly. Adopting a public cloud solution to meet additional needs while still using existing infrastructure creates a hybrid solution.

Hybrid cloud services extend the on-site data center to the cloud, allowing existing workloads to be moved on-site or off-site as needed. VMware hybrid cloud services allow deployment and management of applications either on-site or off-site, providing interoperability, reliability, and performance benefits. Workloads hosted on-premises that fail can be moved to the cloud, providing fault tolerance.

VMware vCloud Air is a range of service options and features based on the trusted, high-performance vSphere platform for virtualization, implementing software-defined data center architecture. From the user's perspective, applications are accessed in the same way, with the difference being a greater offering of services. It supports thousands of applications and dozens of operating systems, and leverages network virtualization to keep systems isolated where needed, whether in private or public clouds. The VMware vCloud Air Network is a global system of existing network service providers in more than 100 countries operating VMware-based clouds, offering infrastructure and application services and supporting compliance and certifications for integration with existing solutions.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is the lowest level of cloud services, specializing in offering compute resources and hardware. Regardless of how virtual machines are implemented, physical servers must exist somewhere. IaaS includes compute resources, storage, and networking—all the hardware and necessary components to implement any solution. The IaaS provider hosts the infrastructure components, hosts the applications, and manages the systems. Organizations without the means to purchase infrastructure can subscribe to someone else's, with the provider hosting applications and managing maintenance, upgrades, patches, and fixes.

Features include on-demand offerings, scalability both upward and downward, high automation, and self-service. Users sign on to a management console, request a new virtual machine, and automated processes allocate it within minutes. VMware's IaaS cloud offering provides customers with IT Infrastructure as a Service, offering an IT solution without the need to build infrastructure. Deploying solutions takes a fraction of the time compared to physical implementation, with dozens of virtual machines potentially up and running within minutes. Virtualized networks are configured to suit security and application needs, and data and systems can be moved to and from the cloud as needed. It supports both existing workloads and new development and provides the same platform in the cloud that is run internally.

VMware vCloud Air Services allow offering IaaS with components including Disaster Recovery, Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, and vCloud Government Service. The latter enables government services to take better advantage of cloud services, particularly where security standards prevent cloud service use. FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, outlines requirements for using cloud services regarding security, and vCloud Government Service is entirely compatible with FedRAMP, encouraging more government departments to use cloud services. Virtual Private Cloud, Block Storage, and Dedicated Cloud can all be implemented using vCloud Air Services to offer Infrastructure as a Service.

VMware Hybrid Cloud Benefits

Key benefits of implementing VMware hybrid cloud solutions include agility, compatibility, ease of use, service offering benefits, technical and administration benefits, and usage benefits. Agility allows creating and tearing down setups quickly without new or additional infrastructure in the on-premises organization, growing as much or as little as needed, provisioning new virtual machines and applications as seen fit, and decommissioning them as seen fit. Going live is very fast, with new virtual machines, servers, and applications available within minutes.

Compatibility includes support for a considerable number of applications and operating systems among public cloud providers, with most supporting thousands of applications and dozens of operating systems. Ease of use provides the same security and compliance configuration as on-site, extending the existing environment with the same support and control systems without requiring reconfiguration.

Service offering benefits include platform stability through public cloud providers' tremendous resources, high availability, and fault tolerance. Reduced risk comes from not having to implement necessary infrastructure, with the provider managing it, lowering costs and the learning curve. Technical and administration benefits include deploying and managing applications as usual, moving resources to and from the cloud, and a single, consistent management interface. Usage benefits include development and testing of applications with laboratory environments built within minutes, consistent performance levels, and expanding or decommissioning virtual machines as needed, paying only for what is used.

Linking Clouds

The vCloud Connector is a utility that links private clouds to public clouds, creating a manageable hybrid cloud environment. It allows transfer of data, systems, applications, and any workload to and from the cloud. Private cloud implementations can be moved to the public cloud when desired by connecting and linking them together and managing everything as a single unit.

Connector capabilities and features include extending the data center by removing the boundaries of the private data center. This increases the breadth of service offerings or applications without incurring additional infrastructure while keeping things transparent to end users and administration. The public cloud becomes the growth location, bridging clouds with ports, applications, data, and virtual machines moved into public clouds. An example is VMware vCloud Air.

Content synchronization provides a single source catalog for all content, with additional catalogs synchronized to the source as copies. Up-to-date content is managed across the entire cloud, with the source catalog duplicated and synchronized to any other catalog available within any cloud instance, always consistent. Ease of management uses a vCloud Connector plugin and the standard vSphere client to manage the overall environment as if it were still the internal private cloud. Workloads, whether virtual machines, templates, or virtual applications, can be viewed, copied, and manipulated. The internal data center, private cloud, and public clouds can all be managed from a single administrative environment. Multiple clouds can be added with no limit on the number of cloud extension instances, facilitating growth or expansion into a more public cloud scenario to increase available service offerings while managing everything similarly to the existing internal cloud.