IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions enables you to quickly and seamlessly integrate or migrate your on-premises VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud by using the scalable, secure, and high-performance IBM Cloud infrastructure and the industry-leading VMware hybrid virtualization technology.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions allows you to easily deploy your VMware virtual environments and manage the infrastructure resources on IBM Cloud. At the same time, you can still use your familiar native VMware product console to manage the VMware workloads.
Deployment Options:
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions provides standardized and customizable deployment choices of VMware virtual environments. The following deployment types are offered:
- VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud: The Cloud Foundation offering provides a unified VMware virtual environment by using standard IBM Cloud compute, storage, and network resources that are dedicated to each user deployment.
- VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud: The vCenter Server offering allows you to deploy a VMware virtual environment by using custom compute, storage, and network resources to best fit your business needs.
- VMware vSphere on IBM Cloud: The vSphere on IBM Cloud offering provides a customizable virtualization service that combines VMware-compatible bare metal servers, hardware components, and licenses, to build your own IBM-hosted VMware environment.
To use IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions to order instances, you must have an IBM Cloud account. The cost of the components that are ordered in your instances is billed to that IBM Cloud account.
When you order VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud, an entire VMware environment is deployed automatically. The base deployment consists of four IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers with the VMware Cloud Foundation stack pre-installed and configured to provide unified software-defined data center (SDDC) platform. Cloud Foundation natively integrates VMware vSphere, VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN, and This has been architected based on VMware-validated designs.
The following image depicts the overall architecture and components of the Cloud Foundation deployment.
Physical infrastructure
Physical Infrastructure provides the physical compute, storage, and network resources to be used by the virtual infrastructure.
Virtualization infrastructure (Compute, Storage, and Network)
Virtualization infrastructure layer virtualizes the physical infrastructure through different VMware products:
- VMware vSphere virtualizes the physical compute resources.
- vSAN provides software-defined shared storage based on the storage in the physical servers.
- VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform that provides logical networking components and virtual networks.
Virtualization Management
Virtualization Management consists of vCenter Server, which represents the management layer for the virtualized environment. The same familiar vSphere API-compatible tools and scripts can be used to manage the IBM hosted VMware environment.
On the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions console, you can expand and contract the capacity of your instances using the add and remove ESXi server capability. In addition, lifecycle management functions like applying updates and upgrading the VMware components in the hosted environment are also available.
Cloud Foundation (VCF) Technical specifications
Hardware (options)
- Small (Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 / 24 cores total, 2.20 GHz / 128 GB RAM)
- Large (Dual Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 / 28 cores total, 2.60 GHz / 512 GB RAM)
- User customized (CPU model and RAM) ( up to 1.5 TB of Memory)
Networking
- 10 Gbps dual public and private network uplinks
- Three VLANs: one public and two private
- Secure VMware NSX Edge Services Gateway
VSIs ( Virtual Server Instances)
- One VSI for Windows AD and DNS services
Storage:
- Small option: Two 1.9 TB SSD capacity disks
- Large option: Four 3.8 TB SSD capacity disks
- User customized option
- Storage disk: 1.9 or 3.8 TB SSD
- Disk quantity: 2, 4, 6, or 8
- Included in all storage options
- Two 1 TB SATA boot disks
- Two 960 GB SSD cache disks
- One RAID disk controller
- One 2 TB shared block storage for backups that can be scaled up to 12 TB (you can choose whether you want the storage by selecting or deselecting the Veeam on IBM Cloud service)
IBM-provided VMware licenses or bring your own licenses (BYOL)
- VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus 6.5u1
- VMware vCenter Server 6.5
- VMware NSX Enterprise 6.3
- VMware vSAN (Advanced or Enterprise) 6.6
- SDDC Manager licenses
- Support and Services fee (one license per node)
As you must be aware that VCF has strict requirements on the physical infrastructure. That’s the reason, you can deploy instances only in IBM Cloud Data Centers that meet the requirements. VCF can be deployed in these cities data centers – Amsterdam, Chennai, Dallas, Frankfurt, HongKong, London, Melbourne, Queretaro, Milan, Montreal, Oslo, Paris, Sao Paulo, Seoul, San Jose, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington.
When you order a VCF instance, you can also order additional services on top of VCF
Veeam on IBM Cloud
This service helps you manage the backup and restore of all the virtual machines (VMs) in your environment, including the backup and restore of the management components.
F5 on IBM Cloud
This service optimizes performance and ensures availability and security for applications with the F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE).
FortiGate Security Appliance on IBM Cloud
This service deploys an HA-pair of FortiGate Security Appliance (FSA) 300 series devices that can provide firewall, routing, NAT, and VPN services to protect the public network connection to your environment.
Managed Services
These services enable IBM Integrated Managed Infrastructure (IMI) to deliver dynamic remote management services for a broad range of cloud infrastructures.
Zerto on IBM Cloud
This service provides replication and disaster recovery capabilities to help protect your workloads.
This post covers some basic information about VMware and VCF options available to IBM Cloud , in the next post i will deploy fully automated VCF , till then Happy learning 🙂
VMTECHIE 
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