The existing infrastructure of a cloud provider needed restructuring to swiftly adapt to growth-related demands. The solution should flexibly respond to new customer workloads (CPU, Memory, and Storage) and enable a standardized deployment for the service provider. The hardware lifecycle is crucial – ensuring new vSphere clusters integrate into an existing environment and that old clusters can be automatedly decommissioned without manual intervention. The environment must offer central Day-2-operations capabilities, certificate management, password rotation, and patch management. The head of the Cloud Solutions & Managed Services department summarized the situation, "Our customers want to rapidly respond to new and altered requirements and bring new systems online."
Tobias Paschek, Lead Architect at comdivision, knew just the solution! He contended that "many service providers need to relieve internal IT personnel to expedite infrastructure development. This is the only way they can offer more advanced services like Kubernetes clusters to integrate cloud-native applications. Automation and self-service are key elements to reduce workload."
Current workloads run natively on vSphere and are connected through virtual switches. For existing clusters that have organically grown and were only standardized through host profiles, there are no automated Day-2-operations – only manual processes. There is a minimal capacity to respond to growth demands due to the absence of processes. Centrally managed firewalls provide necessary network services, e.g., VPN tunnels to local workloads; these customer workloads need to be migrated to the new self-service portal. There is an option to schedule a maintenance window per client, during which network functions are adjusted. Many clients also use physical systems hosted in the service provider's data center.
The parallel implementation of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware Cloud Director (vCD) marked the initial step in the right direction. Introducing managed service interfaces per client to tightly integrate physical workloads with virtual workloads offers a smooth and optimal solution for all customers. The collaborative development and implementation of this solution laid an excellent foundation for an intense knowledge transfer. VMware Cloud Foundation provides fundamental Day-2-operations that have immediately replaced many manual tasks. The workload domain design within Cloud Foundation ensures the standardization of individual vSphere clusters and eliminates different software versions within a workload domain. "The utilization of standardized environments based on manufacturer-validated designs was a turning point. In the past, we consumed a lot of time and resources," said the head of the Operations team. "The existing Day-2-operations reduced complexity and simplified daily operations."
By collaborating with the cloud provider’s team, we, at comdivision, were able to identify the necessary requirements and create a custom design. This design was complimented by a knowledge transfer, which is provides our client with the know-how of how to maximize their new environment.
