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3rd July 2018

VMware EMPOWER – VMware Cloud Services on AWS for Managed Service Providers

Presenter – Martin Hosken

Session expectations

  • VMware Cloud Provider Vision and Strategy
  • Managed Service Provider and VMware Cloud on AWS
  • VMware Cloud on AWS technical deep-dive
  • How can MSP consume this model

I’m writing this during the presentation, so apologies for any mistakes or if it doesn’t flow very well.  Given the nature of the content, there is some information that I’ve not permitted to share.

VMC was the most significant announcement of 2017, and has come into GA.  capability to not only consume but to resell the services, and add managed services to VMC, which is a big deal as $43 billion in Capex  and $47 billion in revenue spent with Hyper Scalers in 2017 alone.  This is exploiting an expectation that Multi-cloud solutions are an emerging opportunity.

Currently VMware cloud providers provide;

  • 100% compatible workloads
  • Choice and control of providers
  • Investment protection
  • Reliability and security
  • Subscriptions models
  • Agility
  • Data sovereignty
  • Global reach
  • No vendor lock in etc.

Extension to a managed service has the potential to yield higher margins vs IaaS, estimated to be 40%

The cloud model is evolving. Currently customer consume MSPs for hosting that provides managed services on private and public clouds, as the use case for multi-cloud grows, so does the need to provide managed services to multi-cloud services.

A multi-cloud architecture creates the potential for complexity.  By utilizing VMC and MSPs to provide a set of consistent platform endpoints, with a common management interface, compatibility and end-user experience.  Market research suggest that customers want to consume multi cloud services, but they don’t want to have to manage the complexity of a multi cloud infrastructure.

MSP for VMC provider program

Is delivered against the following model;

  • Deliver managed services
  • Own terms of services
  • Provide support
  • Utilize VMware or partner brand
  • Manage via UI or APIs
  • Capability to offer services end to end.

The MSP is ostensibly a vSphere user-interface or API, where you can sign customers up and re-sell multi tenanted VMware cloud services without being restricted to traditional data center compute, networking and storage purchase and upgrade cycles. The MSP adds value by providing the managed services.

Managing customer engagement with cloud services and importantly retaining the relationship with the customer.

The offering is best described as VMware as a Service.

Delivered on bare metal located within AWS data center.  Enabling the capability via HCX to migrate workloads and services to the VMC to the cloud without downtime.  As it is located within AWS data centers, it can also boast zero latency 25GB connectivity to AWS services.  Opening up a wealth of opportunities to transform workloads to consuming IaaS within VMC and PaaS services within AWS.

Use cases include Cloud Migrations, Data Center Extensions and Disaster Recovery.

Solutions are located on the East and West coast of the US, with services in London and Frankfurt covering the EU.  Further sites are planned for Australasia.  Having services within these geographies, enable further application potential, where you could potentially locate endpoints closes to the customers that will consume them.

4 Nitro I3 hosts, running vSphere 6.7, providing 144 cores and 2048 GB RAM.  Scaling to 32 nodes for a maximum of 1152 and 16384.  the maximum here is for 10 32 node clusters per customer.  Management VMs are deployed as part of the cluster configuration.  Resource pools are allocated to the management to avoid any issues with over subscription.  Elastic provisioning, enables the provisioning of additional nodes within 7 minutes.  This also allows workflows to be built that allow automated host remediation, should host failures be encountered, or to enable policies to add hosts when thresholds have been breached.  Future integration is planned for proactive monitoring.

The consumption model is based on pay for what you use, not quite as granularity as per CPU cycle, but per host.

32 NVMe Devices within each host to provide 40 TB of RAW capacity, scale up to 256 devices and 320 TB of RAW storage.  Configured with 2 disk group.  As 100% NVMe servicing both the caching and capacity tier, that enables.  Serviced by an isolated network on separate VLANs for each traffic type.

As part of the MSP VMC offering, storage can be segregated.  This enables protection for the management storage, managed by VMware, away from customer data.

Incorporation of stretched vSAN clusters across multiple availability zones, with witness nodes contained within a third.  This requires configuration to ensure that resources are available within each zone.  Licencing is included within the offering.

Once the SDDC has been deployed, all day to day operations are conducted from virtual center.  With VMware technology enabling integration between on-premises and cloud services.  Opening up the opportunity to VMotion workloads into the cloud.

Everything you would expect to see from a vSphere perspective is included, such as APIs, Powershell etc.  The only exception to this is the NSX API, partly this is because of a move toward integrating NSX-T.

Deployed with a restrictive access model, where neither the partner or the customer does not have access to the hosts for, no root ESXi access, No VIB installations etc.

Simplified mode consumption, via VMC Web portal or via a vSphere web Client, vSphere API or powershell.

Traffic that flows over the VPC will not be subjected to egress charges, any egress traffic that consumes non ‘local’ traffic will incur charges – in addition to charges for elastic IPs.

Contractually delivered as an amendment for VCPP.

The vision is for VMware Cloud Providers, to add value through management and support services on top of VMC.  As this is targeted as MSPs this has been built based around multi client deployments. Although at the moment, the VMC VPC has a one to one relationship between the AWS VPC.

Adoption of VMC opens up use case for hybrid applications, that perhaps have features in AWS, VMC and on the private cloud.

Other use cases include

  • Application Migrations
  • Geographic Expansion
  • Vertical Extension
  • DR
  • Elastic Scale and shrinking
  • Lift and Shift

HCX is included in the cloud as part of VMC 🙂  Providing SD optimized WAN connectivity. With live migrations supported for vSphere 5.5, with bulk migrations supported for vSphere 5.1 upward. For those concerned about VMware Tools or hardware upgrades, this is a per VM option.  Further to this as the hosts are running on vSPhere 6.7 this allows EVC to be configured on a VM by VM basis.

HCX further extends the architectural opportunities available to data center consolidation, with support for multiple Data center endpoints.

Deployed with support for vRealize Automation, so that from a customer perspective the VMC could be targeted as an infrastructure endpoint.  It makes it possible that an individual customer requesting blueprints, might not even know that they are located on VMware on AWS.

Thanks Martin for an informative session!

Simon