A city administration with an already large cloud-native footpint needed a solution to seamlessly migrate virtual machines. The total number of their already 10,000+ VMs in their Datacenters is also contantly growing; therefore, to support all their internal usecases and processes, they needed their VMs/Data closer to their cloud native processing functions and systems. After a cloud assessment workshop with comdivision, the customer decided to go with a hybrid cloud solution with VMware Cloud on AWS. We then promptly provided them a PoC and a subsequent production solution.
The city had two data centers of its own, which were operated in a mirrored manner for many applications. Both data centers had recent hardware, opted for VCF on premises, and additionally a VMConAWS deployment in the cloud.
"The on premises data centers where under a significant load and had a high latency between cloud native functions. Consequently services and data had to be optimized and therefore lowered. Another item on their internal agenda was to use technology, which was already in use, that allowed for fast deployments and were easy to use. However, the IT manager contended that "given the city's limited number of IT staff, this would be challenging."
Reinhard Partmann carried out the Cloud Assessment Workshop, a PoC, and implemented the solution with the customer. “Luckily, since the on-premises datacenters where quite recent, we used existing on-premises infrastructure,” reported Partmann. “This was great for VMware Cloud Foundation deployments!Additionaly, we have been able to use a fast and stable circuit with their existing cloud footprint, which enabled us to simplify networking in general.”
Various things were checked as part of a proof of concept:
· Is connection of the VMC on AWS environment with low latency possible?
· Is establishing a stretched network practicable?
· Can workloads be moved on the fly?
· Is Re-IP possible via automation?
"After completing the assesment and the proof of concept, we decided that the applications should move to segments in the VMware Cloud on AWS environment as fast as possible to lower the latency and increase response times,” said the IT manager. Some applications where more challenging than others. Therefore, where Re-IP was not easily possible, we extended the existing segment, which then remained connected to the on-premises data center via Layer 2 temporarily. Then, when possible, we completely migrated to the cloud.
Due to the VMware Cloud on AWS – with more than a dozen hosts – and Aria Operations for Networks, we brought up a stable and extensible plattform for different kinds of workloads, which can work in tandem with workloads running on-premises VCF environments. By using VMware HCX, we significantlylowered the network complexity and increased VM mobility. Additionally, a reduction of investments and costs was made possible, since the cloud based environments and general cloud consumption can be handeld diffenrently from a financial perspective.
