Your Operational

Readiness Checklist for

the Hybrid Cloud
Add control, efficiency and choice to your hybrid cloud.
W H ITE PA P E R

Your Operational Readiness

Checklist for the Hybrid Cloud

One Hybrid Cloud, with Control, Efficiency and Choice

As the owner for delivering enterprise applications and infrastructure services, you have
been looking for a management solution that not only delivers on the agility promise of
the cloud, but also gives you the control on uptime, performance, compliance and cost.
You are also expected to accomplish the above in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud and
heterogeneous environment inherited from years of mergers and acquisitions or from
the needs of avoiding vendor lock-in.
In order to effectively operate and manage a hybrid cloud, you need to place these
solution capabilities very high on your checklist:
Manage across my multi-vendor supplied physical infrastructure.
Support heterogeneous hypervisor environments.
Manage my private cloud.
Manage public clouds, with control over SLAs, compliance and cost.
Offer developers access to public cloud via self-service, while retaining control.
Manage both traditional application architectures as well as cloud-native scale-out
architectures.
Offer authorized users control over how they request infrastructure, multi-tier
applications, or custom services based on group, role, or policy.
Now, what options do you have to acquire these capabilities? You have:
Option A: Look for a purpose-built Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that has been
designed in the era of virtualization and cloud, to meet the latest expectations of
hybrid clouds.
Option B: Revamp your legacy management tools.
Option C: Build your own from scratch.
In this paper, we will examine the benefits and design philosophy of option A - a CMP that
is purpose built for hybrid cloud, and designed to work in heterogeneous environments.

Deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in Minutes, with

Control for the Hybrid Cloud
As the leading server virtualization platform provider, VMware has also become a leader
in cloud management and automation. VMwares One Cloud, Any Application, Any
Device architecture means IT can build a unified hybrid cloud across private, unmanaged
and managed public clouds. Organizations can develop and deploy any type of application
on that one unified hybrid cloud and deliver them to any device desktop, virtual
desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
VMwares cloud management platform, VMware vRealize Suite, is the purpose-built
solution to deliver and manage a unified hybrid cloud. Here are the key benefits you can
expect from it:
Agility and speed:
Shorten time-to-market of new IT services from weeks to minutes, increasing
productivity that enables both IT and the business to focus on innovation and high
value-add activities.

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Columbia Sportswear, a global

leader in outdoor apparel and
footwear, implemented a successful
hybrid cloud strategy based on the
VMware CMP. The customer reports
that it has achieved:
Faster time to market to support
business initiatives, including
geographic expansion and new
B2C capabilities
Faster, more efficient provisioning
of applications and services
Improved performance monitoring
and capacity management
Lowest total cost of ownership
(TCO) compared with its industry
peers
Visibility down to the infrastructure
layer, giving IT the ability to report
to business groups on costs to
develop and run applications

Reduce service delivery time, by employing automation and repeatableble blueprints

across heterogeneous environments traditional apps and modern apps, private cloud
and OpenStack, unmanaged and managed public clouds.
Rapidly respond to business needs, by delivering infrastructures and applications in
minutes.
Improve developer productivity and accelerate time-to-market for new applications
and services.
Control:
Empower LOBs with more self-service options, while ensuring that IT maintains visibility
and policy-based control over how resources are being consumed.
Maintain the same management platform regardless of vendor choices cloud service
providers including Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud Air, multiple
hypervisor vendors including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat KVM,
OpenStack, and most leading physical infrastructure vendors.
Proactively identify and resolve problems faster with intelligent operations across all
machine generated data.
Match capacity to demand with the ability to move workloads easily between private
and public clouds.
Meet SLAs, security and compliance across private and public clouds.
Ensure that capacity is available to develop and test new IT projects.
Optimization and efficiency:
Control/optimize IT budget; align IT with business priorities.
Holistic view of infrastructure and applications; proactively avoid performance issues;
enable optimal resource usage.
Enable optimal resource usage - right size resources to optimize capacity
utilization, assuring resources are allocated based on their business priorities and
service-level requirements.
Standardize and consolidate data centers with intelligent and policy-based IT
operations to significantly reduce CapEx and OpEx.
To understand how these benefits can be realized, lets look at how the VMware Cloud
Management Platform has been purpose-built with the key capabilities you need.

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VMware Cloud Management Platform (CMP): Purpose-built for

the hybrid cloud with both agility and control
VMware vRealize Suite is a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid
cloud, delivering and managing infrastructure and applications quickly while maintaining
IT control. It excels in these capabilities:
Automation Not only enable self-service infrastructure and application services
through a web-based portal and catalog, but also:
Model infrastructure and applications once and deploy in any approved cloud
environment using blueprints.
Allocate the right levels of resources based on business rules and service-level
requirements.
Dynamically orchestrate and balance workloads to meet changing demand.
Intelligent Operations Not only gain complete control over performance, capacity and
configuration management with a scale-out and resilient operations platform, but also:
Proactively identify and remediate issues with predictive analytics and smart alerts.
Get app-to-storage visibility with customizable dashboards.
Extend analytics to unstructured data with integrated log management, for faster rootcause analysis.
Right size over- and under- provisioned VMs and use capacity modeling to anticipate
and optimize future needs.
Improve efficiency through policy-based automation of key IT processes and
compliance standards.
Business Insight Not only view metering of usage, but also:
Demonstrate and compare the costs of complex initiatives and investments, including
private and public clouds.
Enable showback and chargeback through transparency of the types, cost and quality
of IT services consumed by a business unit.
Make informed sourcing decisions based on industry benchmarks and comparison of IT
expenses to peers and cloud service providers.
Unified Management Use a single and extensible platform to provision and manage
applications and infrastructure on-site and in the cloud, and for both traditional and
cloud-native application architectures.
A comprehensive cloud management platform with integrated automation, operations,
and business capabilities delivers insights and visibility that is otherwise not possible
with point products, as well as higher levels of efficiency and agility. The power of the
common platform is delivered through analytics, shared information, and policies
across the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and application services.
Now, you must not forget these capabilities must be accompanied with the need to
govern a multi-vendor heterogeneous environment. We will now examine how this is all
accomplished with VMwares CMP design approach.

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VMware CMP Design Approach

Employing multiple management stacks to control both the private cloud and multiple
public clouds can be a nightmare. Its not practical from an administrative point of view,
nor it is effective from a functionality point of view.
VMwares approach to designing the vRealize Suite CMP architecture revolves around
three tenets. By applying these three principles, the Cloud Management Platform (below
the dotted line in the diagram) helps to establish a full service lifecycle management
(above the dotted line in the diagram), automating the delivery, operations, and business
of traditional and new cloud applications in a heterogeneous environment. This is a
unified management experience. See figure below.

1. Automate everything in the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) and at scale:

Automate everythingnot just for initial provisioning, but for full lifecycle
management.
Create Resource Pools and assign Tenants, Business Groups with users and defined
access controls.
Define SLA, monitoring, threshold/granularity of stats collected, configuration
rules, capacity policy.
End-to-end lifecycle management of SDDC stack (objects/topologies, policies
across VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN, and VMware EVO:RAIL).

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2. Enable collaboration and self-service: Provide tools to enable convergence and

sharing across IT silos more efficiently.
Integrate views for Compute, Storage and Network teams with role-based access
control.
Allow self-service portal to standardize and automate daily operational tasks
performed for app teams.
Deliver easy to consume and modular cloud services.
3. Automate continuous optimization and remediation: Use operations data and
analytics to drive automated optimization and remediation.
Continuously re-balance infrastructure according to performance KPIs and cost
metrics to drive efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Change placement of workloads based on continuous analysis of best fit to
optimize cost/performance balance.
Automatically retire abandoned workloads and find and reclaim unused capacity to
improve utilization levels.
By using the Cloud Management Platform to automate ordering/deployment/metering/
reporting, and allowing LOB to self-service and remediate simple issues, IT can focus on
offering new services, implementing demand management, resolving systemic issues,
and rebalancing the infrastructure.
As a result, the Cloud Management Platform enables IT to fully embrace the
management of a dynamic hybrid cloud. It provides users with choices, improving
user satisfaction. And most importantly, it helps to establish a scalable and
sustainable hybrid cloud model.

Conclusion: Agility and Control Must Be Designed into the

Architecture of the Management Platform
Regaining IT control in addition to providing agility requires a purpose-built solution.
Use the following checklist to compare traditional management with VMware Cloud
Management Platform, and dont compromise operational readiness for your hybrid clouds:
K E Y M A N AG E M E N T
C A PA B I L I T I E S F O R YO U TO
CONSIDER

TRADITIONAL
M A N AG E M E N T
SOLUTION S?

V M WA R E P U R P O S E B U I LT C LO U D
M A N AG E M E N T
P L AT F O R M

Breadth of capability: A
comprehensive set of automation,
operations and business insight
capabilities and a unified
management experience across
virtual, physical and cloud
infrastructure.
Support both traditional application
architectures as well as cloud-native
scale-out architectures.
Best for SDDC, yet open and
heterogeneous.
Optimized for VMware vSphere
environments.

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K E Y M A N AG E M E N T
C A PA B I L I T I E S F O R YO U TO
CONSIDER

TRADITIONAL
M A N AG E M E N T
SOLUTION S?

V M WA R E P U R P O S E B U I LT C LO U D
M A N AG E M E N T
P L AT F O R M

Provision and manage physical

resources as well as other hypervisor
platforms such as Microsoft Hyper-V
and Red Hat KVM.
Extends a unified management
experience to Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure.
Extends a unified management
experience to VMware Managed
Public Cloud - VMware vCloud Air.
Extends a unified management
experience to OpenStack-based
private and public clouds.
Open platform with APIs,
management packs, orchestration
tools and SDK for integrations with
third-party management systems and
leveraging your existing investments
in monitoring and management tools.
Partner Ecosystem offers a wide
range of partner solutions that are
optimized to work with the integrated
cloud management platform.

Learn more about the benefits of the VMware Cloud Management Platform visit
vmware.com/products/vrealize-suite/.

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Copyright 2015 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed
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trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW8781-WP-CKLST-HYBD-CLD-USLET-106 09/15