VMware Multi-Cloud

Architecture: Enabling
Choice and Flexibility
Martin Hosken
Chief Technologist,
VMware Cloud Services

S TAR T
 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Welcome to the World

of Multi-Cloud
In the world as we used to know it, when Amazon sold books and Microsoft software
came in a box stuffed full of floppy disks, enterprise applications typically ran in a
central, on-premises data center. Fast forward 25 years to a time when application
growth is unprecedented and enterprise applications run from a wide range of cloud ABOUT THE AUTHOR

endpoints - some public, some private, some via SaaS delivery, some managed by you, Martin Hosken is the Worldwide Chief
Technologist for VMware Cloud Services.
some managed by others and so forth. Welcome to the world of multi-cloud. Martin works at the intersection of IT
Architecture, Solution Architecture and
Currently, every industry trend report identifies multi-cloud as a key strategy for most
Software Development. His primary focus
large organizations. However, as you already know or will soon come to know, this is on cutting edge solutions that are part of
operating model brings with it a wide range of new challenges that must be addressed today’s complex cloud market. He works
with customers and partners to help them
by IT leaders if this application delivery model is going to prove sustainable.
make the most of the opportunities presented
So why are businesses adopting this strategy, and, as illustrated in Figure 1 below, why by emerging technology and software
development practices. Martin is part of the
does hybrid cloud represent the most desired end state for so many organizations? To
VMware Office of the CTO, Global Field team, a
answer these questions, let’s start by taking a look at why organizations are increasingly double VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX
using multiple private and public clouds in combination to deploy their applications. Number 117) in Data Center Virtualization
and Cloud Management and Automation, an
established vExpert, and is the author of three
books, dozens of papers, blogs and articles
based on VMware and other technologies.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Multi-Cloud Drivers
While there is a school of thought that believes the only true way to deliver
next-gen applications is to take advantage of a cloud provider’s higher-level
services, for many organizations cloud provider lock-in is a key concern. The desire
to avoid becoming locked into a specific public cloud provider’s proprietary services
and pricing model often drives organizations to look at how they can diversify their
use of cloud environments.
This motivation, avoiding lock-in, is also present when it comes to considerations
about where to build cloud native services based on containers, microservices and
Kubernetes. While these technologies are based on open sourced components and
designed to be portable, they are also being implemented by public cloud providers
in ways that try to make their platform ‘sticky.’

Type of Hybrid Cloud Strategy

% of enterprise respondents with hybrid strategy

3%
Single 6%
Private Multiple
Public
6%
Single
Public 93% 87%
Hybrid
Multi-cloud Cloud

FIGURE 1. Multi-cloud growth

Source: Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

WHY ARE ORGANIZATIONS Cloud providers seek to provide cloud services that differentiate their offerings but
ADOPTING A HYBRID CLOUD that also tie the customer to their cloud platform, which makes application portability
STRATEGY?
challenging.
Another key driver of multi-cloud use is shadow IT, where technology is being
adopted by business units independently of any governance from a central team
Vendor Lock-in concerned with the needs of the overall enterprise. Different preferences exist
among business units for higher-level cloud services that will integrate with existing
applications and accomplish specific tasks in areas such as Machine Learning,
Artificial Intelligence or Internet of Things. This, in turn, results in an organization
Shadow IT needing to use multiple cloud providers to meet the combined needs of all
business units.
Compliance requirements, such as the European Union’s GDPR, will often require
customer data to be held in specific regions. The implementation of this requirement
Integrated
Higher-Level Services often leads to a multi-cloud use scenario where data is hosted in locations that satisfy
GDPR requirements while application code is hosted elsewhere. Finally, application
resilience and the protection from outages offered by not having everything running
in one location, or even one public cloud, leads to multi-cloud use as well.

Compliance

Resilience

FIGURE 2. Reasons for adopting

a hybrid cloud strategy

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Multi-Cloud Operations Means

Tackling Significant Complexity
As mentioned earlier, a multi-cloud strategy brings Another key challenge for organizations who consume
with it a range of management headaches and multiple public clouds is the operational overhead
several difficult challenges for organizations. Each associated with maintaining common governance,
public cloud embodies a unique interaction model security and compliance models across this complex
with different ways for end users to authenticate and multi-cloud environment. This is such an important
to then to consume, request or modify a service or aspect of running a modern business, many
application. Each cloud also comes with a unique organizations are realizing that they would like a single,
set of API surfaces. For most businesses this more unified approach to meet the need for these often
becomes a balancing act of weighing up the legally required controls.
benefits of adopting multi-cloud technologies Maintaining skill sets in the fast-changing world of
versus the burden of supporting them. cloud, and the ability to train teams to operate multiple
These challenges are exacerbated by a lack of public clouds, puts a lot of pressure on teams. In
comprehensive multi-cloud tooling, meaning that addition to this, simply onboarding a new team member
most of the management tools used by cloud and getting them up to speed on the diverse sets of
operational teams are provided by the public cloud required skills takes longer, is harder, and adds
provider that is hosting the application. While these significant risk to the day-to-day operations each
tools work well for a single public cloud endpoint, time a cloud is added to the mix.
they typically cannot address operational use cases
that run across multiple public clouds.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by

Multi-Cloud Complexity
To simplify multi-cloud complexity, organizations are VMware Clouds Public Clouds
beginning to adopt a hybrid cloud model. Before we
go too far with this topic, it is important to ensure we
are aligned on terminology and the differences
between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud.
As illustrated in figure 3, multi-cloud is a strategy which
aims to describe how organizations use multiple cloud
providers to meet diverse technical and business
requirements. The term hybrid-cloud is generally used
to describe the combination of private and public cloud
infrastructure, where private is either on-premises or
hosted in a colocation facility, and public cloud
infrastructure is provided by one or more hyperscaler
clouds. In a hybrid cloud scenario, common
management and orchestration tools are used to
deploy workloads and maintain the balance between
the two as well. FIGURE 3. Enterprise customer multi-cloud strategy

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Hybrid cloud is attractive because many businesses would really like to modernize
at their own pace and be able to find a way to do so starting with their own data
center. They would rather do this than be under pressure to move everything to
the public cloud as quickly as possible, which can be very risky from multiple
perspectives. Also, many organizations are looking for a more granular step-by-
step journey towards modernizing applications while gaining many of the benefits
of running in the cloud and also maintaining workloads under a single
governance model.
A hybrid cloud delivers on this idea by creating a bridge between your own
on-premises environment and one or more public or hosted cloud environments.
This model often includes employing public cloud resources for regular or
occasional bursts of compute and/or storage capacity, for instance adding capacity
on-demand to provide additional resources for end-of-quarter batch processing or
seasonal bursts in website utilization.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean

to Your Organization?
There is no doubt that the term hybrid cloud is one The goal for the remainder of this eBook is to help
of the most overused phrases related to modern customers navigate and better understand the
infrastructure technology, and can be, and often is, options available by leveraging VMware Cloud.
used to describe many different scenarios that can As illustrated in Figure 4 on the next page, in this
mean different things to different organizations. seemingly ever-evolving world of hybrid cloud, the
What I know is this: there is a common desire options for customers appear to be endless. So,
amongst organizations of all sizes to run applications whether it’s Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure
in the most appropriate setting for that application VMware Solutions or VMware Cloud™ on AWS, we’ll
type and to have the flexibility to move applications address the differentiating factors for each of the
should a business or technical reason arise. options. Regardless of the service being available
While flexibility and choice are key for businesses, directly from VMware or one of its public cloud
we now appear to live in an age of overloaded partners, I am aiming to provide enough
terms and ambiguity when it comes to technology information to help organizations find
areas such as the cloud. Every vendor in the the correct fit for their business and
industry is keen to promise a utopian vision of an strategic technical goals.
easy path towards cloud or digital transformation.
So how can businesses separate reality from hype,
and how can they maintain a grounded approach
that supports smart decision making as it relates
to executing strategies around application
modernization and multi-cloud use?

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

As illustrated in figure four, VMware Cloud offers a wide range of hybrid cloud options
through two different delivery models. VMware Cloud™ on AWS is sold and operated VMware VMware

by VMware while all the others shown are built, sold and operated by VMware cloud VMware to VCPP/SISO Partner
partners. What makes these solutions a hybrid cloud is their ability to blur the lines
between applications, infrastructure, hardware resources, support operations and
AWS
management. The primary aim of any hybrid cloud should be to: VMware
VMware on AWS

• Simplify access to resources

VMware to VMware Cloud on AWS
• Provide the business faster time to market

• Offer more geographic options faster

VMware Google Cloud
VMware Engine
• Create a global architecture and treat it like any other physical location
VMware to Google Cloud VMware Engine

Having a hybrid cloud that is based on a common platform provides a wide range of
additional benefits, which can include seamless application mobility, common
networking, transparent management and governance. This in turn gives us a far Oracle
Cloud VMware
VMware
Solution
simpler state of consistent operations and automation for both virtual machines and
VMware to Oracle VMware Cloud Solution
containers, and is the desired end state for most organizations.

VMware IBM Cloud

VMware to IBM Cloud

Azure
Azure
VMware VMware
Solution

VMware to Azure VMware Solution

FIGURE 4. The choice of hybrid cloud solutions

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Benefits of a Homogeneous Approach

A homogeneous hybrid cloud based on VMware Cloud This hybrid cloud experience also includes the ability to
provides the native form of the model by delivering a extend networking rules from on-premises to public cloud.
service that is a natural extension to a customers’ By providing a common management and orchestration
existing data centers. In this architecture we are talking platform there is no need to learn a whole new skillset.
about the same platform that you use for on-premises You can continue to use the same tools with which your
being extended for use as a hybrid cloud, through the operators are already familiar. This can also help address the
consumption of resources on public cloud. gap between the business and IT. IT can remain in control by
Through the use of VMware Cloud Foundation™, a using the same procedures and management processes they
core part of VMware Cloud, customers can implement have worked with previously, and the line of business can
a network integration scheme that allows you to move get to the cloud faster without having to re-architect the
workloads from private to public and back with ease. application. This approach to cloud facilitates far better
The aim is that the public cloud is simply another control of data and simplifies a wide range of operational
deployment target within your “virtual” data center. factors, such as access, performance, availability, security,
This has the key advantage of not requiring applications data protection and governance.
to be modified when moved into the public cloud and
the ability to deploy new and existing apps on the
same common platform. In addition, because the
entire hybrid cloud is built on vSphere®, it can take
advantage of support for over 90 different guest
operating systems and more than 500 applications,
not something seen natively on the hyperscale
public clouds.

FIGURE 5. Cloud architecture

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Bringing Together the Best of Two Worlds

Before 2017, there were, broadly speaking, two options available to achieve a hybrid
cloud scenario. Organizations could build a VMware hybrid cloud by working with
one of the 4,000+ VMware Cloud Partners across the globe to build a
homogeneous solution. This solution offered multiple benefits – everything from
the consistent tooling and skills to security policy consistency and governance. The
downside to this strategy was that you couldn’t take direct advantage of the
massive innovation in cloud services that were available on public clouds like AWS,
Azure or Google Cloud.
Alternatively, you could architect a solution across an on-premises environment
(likely built on VMware) and a hyper-scaler public cloud provider. In this scenario,
you could get access to cloud provider innovation, but, for the most part, your team
was on the hook for building out any interconnectivity that was needed for
applications to interact across a mixed platform environment.
This is because the core infrastructure between your on-premises environment and
the public cloud were different. You couldn’t easily move a traditional application
between environments due to dependencies between the application and the
infrastructure it was deployed on. Even with these challenges, for many
organizations, access to innovative cloud services, and the benefits of accelerated
time to market and the increased agility that flowed from this access, outweighed
the operational challenges brought about by this type of mixed platform hybrid
cloud solution.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Then in 2017, VMware blurred the lines between these two distinct options by giving
customers the ability to take advantage of a solution that could deliver both models
in a single architecture. VMware Cloud on AWS was the first joint VMware and
Public Cloud provider partnership focused on delivering a homogeneous
infrastructure that at the same time simplified access to public cloud cloud services.
With many VMware customers wanting to extend their IT base into one or more
public clouds, the AWS partnership delivered a co-developed service that runs
VMware Cloud Foundation (compute, storage, networking and management)
natively on AWS bare metal infrastructure. This was the first in a new class of hybrid
cloud solutions. The solution was revolutionary in its architecture, simple delivery
model, and close proximity to AWS native services.

FIGURE 6. Anatomy of VMware Cloud on AWS

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

So, what is VMware Cloud on AWS and why is it so important? Consider VMware
Cloud on AWS as a VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) deployed on
AWS bare metal hardware “for rent.” More specifically, it is an Infrastructure-as-a-
Service (IaaS) cloud that is owned and operated by VMware and built using the
SDDC model. It brings together the best of both private and public cloud by
enabling organizations to deploy workloads on AWS while being able to manage
both clouds using the same operational processes they use in their own data
centers.
To be clear, VMware Cloud on AWS is a cloud offering that is managed, operated
and supported by VMware. The service provides dedicated SDDC instances that are
hosted in AWS facilities with hardware that is owned and managed by Amazon. The
service is dedicated, with hardware that is solely assigned to that customer SDDC. It
delivers a private cloud operating experience with high-speed, low-latency access
to AWS native services.
The VMware service is built on top of AWS on-demand billing and is therefore
based on actual consumption. It allows VMware to offer flexible consumption
models with elastic resources that can be scaled on demand. Finally, VMware Cloud
on AWS can also be consumed and offered as a service through Managed Service
Providers (MSP). The MSP model, under the VMware Partner Connect Program,
allows partners to leverage various VMware Cloud Services to broaden their
portfolio of offerings and provide value added features and functionality to
customer-focused managed services.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Azure VMware Solution

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) represents the next installment of VMware’s any cloud
expansion. Like VMware Cloud on AWS, AVS allows customers to run VMware
workloads natively on the Azure platform. However, in this model, Microsoft owns the
service and provides support for the management, networking and back-end
infrastructure end-to-end. Microsoft, now a VMware Cloud Provider Partner, works
closely with VMware engineering to build, maintain and support the platform.

FIGURE 7. Anatomy of Azure VMware solution

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

With AVS, customers can deploy and manage VMWare workloads on a OTHER NOTABLE BENEFITS OF
AZURE VMWARE SOLUTIONS
dedicated high performance and consistent platform running inside Azure.
• Runs in dedicated environment in Azure
Organizations can provision, expand and reduce VMware infrastructure as data centers across multiple regions
business demands. This allows you to leverage Azure economies of scale • Engineered and delivered by Microsoft, a
VMware Cloud Provider Partner
without the complexity or cost of re-architecting the applications being
• Seamless Azure experience through the
migrated, while also maintaining your existing operating models, as illustrated Azure portal
in Figure 7. • Programmable and integrated into Azure
management
Similar to the VMware Cloud on AWS scenario, with this solution customers can • Available from Microsoft as an individual
modernize applications at a comfortable pace while also expanding into native service or with Azure Credits (same as any
Azure native offering)
Azure services for the deployment of innovative application architectures, such
as the zero trust architecture illustrated in Figure 8. This model gives customers
flexibility, choice and control over critical business applications and mitigates
many of the risks associated with public cloud migration.
Customers get fast, simple deployment of software-defined infrastructure in the
cloud with cost-effective, as-a-service cloud consumption:
• Low-latency, high bandwidth Azure public cloud services access

• Qualifies for 3 years of extended security updates and support of SQL and
Windows Server 2008R2 after End of Support

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Whether you are decommissioning existing data centers or just need to expand
and innovate into AVS, this service is clearly designed for organizations that have
standardized IT infrastructure on VMware technology and are looking for the ability
to expand and leverage the wide range of high-level services available in
Microsoft Azure.

FIGURE 8. Azure VMware solution – sample zero trust security reference architecture

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

IBM Cloud
No discussion about hyperscale clouds could be complete without highlighting the
father of the hyperscale cloud model – IBM. IBM and VMware have a long-standing
relationship to accelerate hybrid cloud innovation and adoption across global enterprises.
IBM makes it easy for enterprises of all sizes to securely move VMware workloads to the
cloud and leverage open technologies to modernize business operations.The IBM public
cloud helps customers across a wide range of vertical industries meet security, resiliency,
performance and global deployment requirements. IBM Cloud clients gain access to a
range of enterprise-grade IaaS and PaaS services that allow developers to leverage
innovative cloud service capabilities from IBM.

FIGURE 9. Anatomy of IBM Cloud

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Google Cloud VMware Engine

Officially made generally available June of 2020, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE)
delivers a fully integrated, native VMware experience on Google Cloud. GCVE provides
high levels of performance and reliability to support production enterprise workloads
from within Google Cloud data centers.
Just as we have seen with the previously discussed hybrid cloud solutions, with this
service you can migrate or extend your on-premises workloads to Google Cloud in
minutes, connecting to a dedicated VMware environment directly through the Google
Cloud Console.

FIGURE 10. Anatomy of Google Cloud VMware engine

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

For customers who are strategically aligned with Google Cloud Platform, GCVE
provides everything you need to run your VMware environment natively in
Google Cloud. The solution delivers a fully managed VMware Cloud platform that
includes VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter®, VMware vSAN™, VMware NSX®,
and VMware HCX. These technologies are deployed as a dedicated environment
on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. With this service you can extend or
migrate workloads without changes to Google Cloud process in minutes
using HCX.
Google Cloud VMware Engine is a Google first-party solution, fully owned,
operated and supported by Google Cloud. At the time of writing, Google Cloud
VMware Engine is available in US-East, US-West, Europe and Japan, with plans
to add eight more regions by the end of 2020.
GCVE offers 99.99% availability to customers and has pricing options that allow
on-demand consumption as well as 1- or 3-year commitments. All billing is
addressed through the same Google Cloud used for native services. As with all
of the hybrid cloud solutions discussed in this series, the aim of GCVE is to allow
customers to focus on applications and their underlaying workloads, while
Google Cloud SRE teams manage other service aspects, such as the lifecycle of
VMware SDDC technologies.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Next up is Oracle, which brought Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) to market. The
solution enables customers to run VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle’s Generation 2
cloud infrastructure while retaining full VMware administrative access and compatibility
with VMware vCenter. The key differentiator for OCVS is the fact that the customer has
full control to build and manage their cloud VMware environment as if it ran in their own
data center.
Again, the migration of VMware workloads without re-architecture or modification of
tools and processes is key to the value of this service. However, Oracle is the only
VMware hyper-scale cloud offering that allows customers to migrate existing vSphere
environments to the cloud while retaining total control
over lifecycle management, such as updates, patches,
and validation of integrated third-party tools, for all
VMware components.
The capabilities offered by OCVS allows joint VMware
and Oracle customers to easily integrate with Oracle’s
cloud native services, including Oracle Autonomous
Database, Oracle Exadata, VMs, or other bare metal
compute instances, all of which run in close proximity in
the same cloud data centers, on the same virtual cloud
networks, accessible through the same OCI user
interface and APIs.

FIGURE 11. Anatomy of Oracle Cloud VMware solution

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Public Cloud IaaS vs.

Running VMware on Public Clouds
Comparing native public cloud services with a VMware Another key concern for many companies moving to the
software-defined data center running within that same cloud is vendor lock-in (Figure 12). Organizations can be
public cloud is not easy and is a bit like comparing weary of a scenario where it is easy to move into a cloud
apples with oranges or beer and wine. Quite simply, a infrastructure but difficult to leave without incurring large
lot of it comes down to what your priorities are and costs, risk and complexity. This is due to the proprietary
what your end goals need to be from a business nature of public cloud technologies. This is another reason
perspective. While it might be possible to do both a why a common VMware SDDC across all the major cloud
commercial and technical comparison between providers is appealing to many customers.
workloads running on AWS EC2 or Azure VM with
those running on VMware, that data alone is unlikely
to be the major influencer of decisions around your
multi-cloud strategy.
So, what it comes down to is business tactical and
strategic priorities. For instance, if flexibility, choice
and control are key requirements when it comes to
workload placement, then VMware, as we have shown
throughout this series, offers a compelling set of
options.

FIGURE 12. Understanding public cloud lock-in

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Consider Cloud Economics

Now let’s turn to the question of cloud economics. Cloud native IaaS will typically benefit
from the cloud economic model, where you pay per second for VM capacity. Under the
VMware model you pay per host, which, despite the move from Capex to Opex, is the same
economic model as on-premises.
Similar to on-premises environments, consolidation ratio is a key driver of cost. The cost of a
cloud native IaaS workload is consistent. It doesn’t change based on how many workloads
you deploy. However, in the VMware model, as the host cost is fixed, the cost per workload
decreases as you consolidate more workloads onto a single host (Figure 13).
Other factors, such as automation, can also impact the cost of cloud operations. In some
cases, cloud native IaaS can provide richer automation
across the entire public cloud ecosystem (on a single
cloud) whereas a VMware solution might require
additional cloud management or automation tooling to
create this more deeply integrated capability.
Another consideration might be ISV integrated tools.
For instance, Microsoft has an Azure Backup solution
that integrates directly with Azure native IaaS,
therefore, it is likely that a separate solution for
VMware in Azure would be required. However, you
could also turn this on its head and consume the same
backup solution in AVS as you deploy on-premises,
simplifying the overall data protection capabilities
FIGURE 13. IaaS cloud cost model comparison (illustration purposes only)
across all cloud environments.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Wrapping Up
In this eBook, I have looked at VMware Cloud’s unique approach to delivering a
multi-cloud architecture with a focus on the ‘One Platform, Any Cloud’ approach
taken by VMware. There are, as we have seen, many considerations around the
consumption of these platforms and why you would elect to deploy one option
over another.
Extending or migrating an on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud using a
non-VMware approach can be time consuming, costly and fraught with complex
cloud migration, implementation processes and challenges. In this scenario,
customers must contend with differences in skill sets and tools required to manage
these environments, typically leading to cloud silos.
In addition, separate access, security and networking policies, leading to
inconsistencies in control, can make it extremely difficult to deliver on enterprise-
level SLAs that promise consistent availability and performance across on-premises
and public cloud applications.
In contrast, migrating from VMware on-premises to VMware in the cloud lets
you seamlessly move workloads without the cost or complexity of refactoring
applications. This approach allows you to manage workloads consistently across
all environments.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

VMware is committed to creating a public cloud experience that is simply about

consumption and aims to make cloud complexity invisible to the customer,
thereby allowing organizations more time to focus on transforming their
business. Leveraging VMware across cloud environments can reduce your
operational burden by moving to an on-demand, self-service model while
maintaining continuity with your existing tools, processes and skill sets. At the
same time, you can still take advantage of native cloud services to supercharge
your application portfolio, integrating emerging technologies such as AI, ML or
IOT into existing or new applications.
These VMware on public cloud solutions make Hybrid Application Design a
reality. Hybrid Application Design describes an application topology which spans
both a VMware Cloud platform and native public services, with a unique solution
that delivers a two-way high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect with native
services for hybrid application architectures. This allows customers to gain the
benefits of native cloud services by incorporating them into application designs
– in other words, binding VMware IaaS with public cloud services on a per-
workload or application basis.
As we have looked at these different hybrid cloud solutions, hopefully you have
seen that there is a lot of similarity across all of them. At the same time, each
solution has key differentiating factors. For instance, VMware Cloud on AWS is
the only solution designed, operated and sold by VMware. You may also have
noticed that Microsoft with Azure VMware Solution has some key licensing
advantages not available to any other public cloud vendor, and Oracle’s offer
differentiates by providing full customer management capabilities.
But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: They all deliver the flexibility,
simplicity and control that many enterprise customers want to take with them to
the public cloud.

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 The World of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Cloud is Motivated by Benefits of a Azure VMware Solution Public cloud IaaS vs. Running
Multi-Cloud Drivers Multi-Cloud Complexity Homogeneous Approach IBM Cloud VMware on Public Clouds
Multi-Cloud Complexity What Does Hybrid Cloud Mean Bringing Together the Best Google Cloud VMware Engine Consider Cloud Economics
to Your Organization? of Two Worlds Wrapping Up
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

VMware Can Help You

Architect a Successful Strategy
For help architecting a future state that accelerates your application modernization efforts,
engage your local VMware team or one of the many thousands of partners that support VMware
technologies. Working side by side with you, we can help architect an approach to application
modernization that provides your organization with the best combination of choice, flexibility and
operational simplicity.

About VMware Cloud

Redefine the foundation of IT with cloud capabilities, modern architectures, and consistent
operations in the data center, any cloud, and edge for all applications. VMware Cloud transforms
private data centers, hyperscalers, and remote sites into a unified and elastic multi-cloud
platform with integrated compute, network, storage, security, Kubernetes, and cloud
management optimized to securely and reliably deliver any application, everywhere.

About VMware Cloud Universal

VMware Cloud Universal is a flexible subscription that delivers enterprise-class multi-cloud
infrastructure and operations combining compute, storage, networking, management, and
modern app services with customer entitlements to flexibly deploy VMware Cloud across a
customer-managed private cloud, a fully managed local cloud, or fully managed public cloud.

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