After a successful proof of concept (PoC), a city administration located on the East Coast decided to roll out a hybrid cloud solution with VMware Cloud on AWS. This enables them to burst to cloud and have a 3rd site available to them.
The city had two data centers, which were operated in a mirrored fashion for many applications. As many solutions and applications require a witness, this is where a third site is helpful.
We were tasked with providing a witness site for Solutions and Applications and migrating workloads with VMware HCX to VMware Cloud on AWS.
After a Cloud Assessment Workshop with the customer, Reinhard Partmann, a specialist and architect with comdivision, conducted a PoC. Following the PoC, we were able to enter the production phase – starting with the local network and the design.
The PoC was a run a couple of moths before we headed into production and various metrics were checked:
· Is connection of the VMC on AWS environment with low latency possible?
· Is establishing a stretched network practical?
· Can workloads be moved spontaneously?
· Is Re-IP possible via automation?
During the PoC, all customer requirements were tested. After dismantling the PoC environment, the production environment was deployed with four hosts, later expanded to 12, within a dedicated VPC to ensure proper configurations.
HCX was deployed across all data centers, tested, and moved into production, enabling seamless integration and maximizing efficiency.
"We repeatedly set up the VMware Cloud on AWS environment across two Availability Zones to ensure availability, with workloads backed up to a different region," said Partmann.
The IT manager and the internal IT team successfully carried out the VM mobility tasks without any major business interruptions – ensuring that all security concepts aligned with their regulations. “We have significantly improved reliability through the stretched environment at another location,” they contended. They also noted that "we were able to greatly reduce investments in renting data center floor space, as there was no longer a need for a complex data center renovation. The investment in hardware and software was replaced by a consumption-based solution using VMware Cloud on AWS."
This transition not only optimized operational costs, but also increased the agility and scalability of the company’s IT infrastructure. As a result, the IT team is now better positioned to support future growth and adapt to changing business needs.
