managedhosting.de GmbH is a German Cloud Service Provider offering innovative solutions in managed hosting, e-commerce, and IT outsourcing to businesses, banks, publishers, and SaaS providers. They pride themselves on exceptional flexibility and speed in addressing client needs, delivering high-quality, fast, cost-effective, value-added services.
For years, managedhosting.de operated a stable vCloud Director platform, supporting IaaS, DRaaS, and SaaS, which required expansion for the latest technology stack, self-service options, performance data visibility, integrated billing, and incorporation of Kubernetes, modern APIs, and HTML5 capabilities.
Andreas Wolske, the (Co-) CEO, stated, "The success of our company is primarily based on the work and personal commitment of each individual employee." He continued, "To best address the challenges of this project and determine the optimal way forward, we decided to conduct a workshop with every stakeholder in our company, with external assistance from cloud experts at comdivision.”
Fabian Lenz was invited to participate in the strategy workshop. Lenz explained, "We found that it would be best to start with a greenfield approach and proceed with a step-by-step migration of the workloads. I proposed using the VMware Cloud Provider Pod to deploy a VMware-based, greenfield cloud adhering to VMware Validated Design principles." A Cloud Provider Pod-deployed stack undergoes rigorous testing for interoperability, performance, and scalability. It's designed for demanding Cloud Provider workloads, deploying essential technologies like data center extension, cloud migration, multi-tenancy, and chargeback. This enables swift delivery of VMware-based cloud services, including VMware vCloud Director, VMware NSX, VMware vSphere, VMware vRealize Log Insight, VMware Operations & Tenant App, and VMware vCloud Availability for DRaaS.
Lenz remarked: "It was advantageous that the comdivision team, including myself, was deeply involved in the development of the Cloud Provider Pod. I can personally attest to the system's capability to roll out an entire platform within hours. However, integrating the system into an existing environment requires meticulous planning. The deployment is based on a highly standardized set of parameters. As managedhosting.de required specific network changes, we fully utilized the customizability of the Cloud Provider Pod. We conducted a proof of concept (PoC) in comdivision's own lab environment and demonstrated to the managedhosting.de team how seamlessly the deployment of the Cloud Provider Pod operates.
Following the deployment, managedhosting.de was able to thoroughly test, evaluate, and adapt the cloud platform to meet their requirements. New tenants were successfully onboarded to the new platform, while existing tenants were given ample time to migrate their workloads to the Cloud Provider Pod-based platform.
Wolske exclaimed, "The planning and deployment of the complete Cloud Provider Pod platform, from 0 to 100%, took less than 5 days! Fabian did an excellent job explaining the process to our team and guiding us on how to prepare for the onboarding process of migrating our existing customers' workloads. We are planning to engage comdivision and Fabian's expertise to streamline this process further."
