An established cloud provider's infrastructure needed to be transformed in order enable self-service for their existing customers. The current IaaS offering is based on hosting virtual machines and applications within a dedicated vSphere environment. Since more and more customers are demanding self-service capabilities, an extension of the current solution needed to be found. Capabilities like virtual machine console access, virtual hardware changes, or even the creation of virtual machines created a lot of operational overhead.
A clear goal was set by the customer's Head of Cloud Solutions and Managed Services: "Customers would like to leverage a self-service to manage their virtual machines and applications. The capabilities of Cloud Director that comdivision demonstrated to us would immediately solve many problems and reduce operational efforts within the IaaS offerings." Clear goals and quick delivery? A specialty of our architects – Matthias Eisner and Fabian Lenz.
Current workloads run natively on vSphere, which is not accessible to the tenants. A high-availability Cloud Portal that is based on Cloud Director and secured by design must be offered. Besides the design and deployment of the Cloud, it is important that existing workloads can be easily integrated into that new cloud platform.
VMware Cloud Director provides the necessary foundation for the new IaaS offering.
Designing and implementing the new solution and complimenting it with an intensive knowledge transfer was an important step in bringing the internal IT team to the next level. During this stage, a detailed onboarding procedure was defined to be used by existing and future operators. To secure access to the cloud platform, NSX-Advanced Load Balancer was implemented to make sure only healthy Cloud Director cells are used for customer interactions. Besides that, certain blacklists have been defined to make sure only admins from a secure management network can connect to administrative URLs within Cloud Director.
Affirming the success of our solution, our client happily contended that by working as a team, that we, at comdivision, were able to understand their needs and was able to provide a design fitting their requirments and ambitions. The ongoing knowledge transfer was well recieved and regarded as a valuable experience that’ll serve them now and in the future! "Finding a partner understanding the cloud provider business on the one hand and can deliver a solution quickly and in time has become difficult nowadays. With comdivision we found the perfect partner for that," concluded the Head of Cloud Services.
