Key Features of VMware vCloud Suite
VMware is making it easier than ever to build a cloud infrastructure, making available all elements that you need to deliver a cloud and operationalize your VMware vSphere environment in one easy-to-purchase solution.
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Service Provisioning
Cloud Operations Management
Cloud Business Management
Cloud Infrastructure
VMware vSphere
Virtualized Infrastructure with Policy-based Automation
Meet SLAs for the most demanding business-critical applications, at the lowest TCO with the industry-leading virtualization platform and enabler for cloud computing architectures. VMware vSphere delivers the server consolidation and efficient resource management benefits of virtualization through features which have created the industry standard, such as:
- vSphere ESXi: Robust, production-proven, high performance virtualization layer
- vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion: Eliminate application downtime from planned server maintenance by migrating running virtual machines between hosts and with proactive and non-disruptive storage migration
- vSphere Distributed Switch: Centralize network provisioning, administration, and monitoring using datacenter-wide network aggregation.
- vSphere DRS, Storage DRS, Storage I/O Control, Network I/O control vSphere DRS: Automatically load-balance across hosts and storage, define priority access to network and storage resources.
- vSphere High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Data Protection and Replication: Increase availability of applications, storage resources, infrastructure and management
- vShield Zones and vShield Endpoint: Secure vSphere with application-aware firewall and anti-virus functions offloaded to a hardened security virtual machine
- vSphere Host Profiles and Auto Deploy: Automation for rapid deployment and patching of vSphere hosts and fast setup of new hosts
Cloud Infrastructure
VMware vCloud Director
Virtual Datacenters for Consumption within Minutes
Provision software-defined datacenter services as complete virtual datacenters that are ready for consumption in a matter of minutes.
- Elastic Virtual Datacenters: Eliminate compute, storage and networking silos to ensure highest hardware utilization, and allocate resources to tenant organizations using pooling across multiple vSphere clusters.
- Service catalog: Deploy multi-tier applications as pre-configured virtual appliances with virtual machines, operating system images, and other media with the click of a button from service catalogs.
- Multi-tenancy: Create a secure multi-tenant environment with multiple organizations sharing the same infrastructure, thus leading to economies of scale
- Fast Provisioning: Reap significant storage savings via VMware’s unique Linked Clone technology that lets end users rapidly clone base vApps into children vApps by only storing changes made by children and reading all other data from the base.
VMware vCloud Connector
Public Cloud Extensibility
VMware makes hybrid cloud computing easy with vCloud Connector. Bring your existing applications, workloads and templates to a public cloud while retaining the freedom to move these applications back into your own datacenter when desired. With the advanced edition of vCloud Connector, the logical boundaries of your datacenter are extended and you can manage a single content catalog across your entire private and public cloud environment.
- One Network: Extend the logical boundaries of the virtual datacenter with Datacenter Extension
- One Catalog: Manage a single content catalog across your entire cloud environment with Content Sync
- One Cloud: Bridge your private cloud with any vCloud Director-based public cloud from over 150 service providers
VMware vCloud Networking and Security
Software-defined Networking, Security and Ecosystem Integration with Continuous Firewall and Network Availability
Enhance operational efficiency, unlock agility and enable extensibility to rapidly respond to business needs. vCloud Networking and Security provides a broad range of services in a single solution, including virtual firewall, VPN, load balancing and VXLAN extended networks.
- Edge provides a rich set of integrated networking and security gateway services for protecting the perimeter of virtual datacenters. The Edge virtual appliance provides effective firewalling as well as integrated gateway services such as NAT, load balancer, VPN and DHCP. Edge High Availability protects against network, host and software failures.
- App Firewall segments and isolates critical applications within the virtual data center using virtual network interface card (vNIC) level firewalling. It enables you to create logical and elastic trust zones that are protected from network-based threats. It provides deep visibility into network communications to enforce granular policies.
- VXLAN is the enabling technology for network virtualization, providing network abstraction, elasticity and scale across the datacenter. VXLAN provides an architecture for scaling your applications across clusters and pods without any physical network reconfiguration.
- Data Security scans virtual workloads for sensitive data such as credit card information and reports violations of regulations (such as PCI-DSS), enabling IT organizations to quickly assess the state of compliance with regulations from around the world.
- Management and Reporting through seamless integration with VMware vCenter Server* and VMware vCloud Director, provides a central point of control for deploying, managing, reporting, logging, and integrating 3rd-party security and gateway services.
- vCloud Ecosystem Framework integrates partner services at either the vNIC or the virtual edge or the policy management plane through REST APIs.
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Automated Disaster Recovery Planning, Testing and Execution
Ensure the simplest, most affordable and reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications, leveraging cost-efficient vSphere Replication or storage-based replication to:
- Replace traditional, error-prone manual runbooks with simple, automated recovery plans.
- Enable frequent, non-disruptive testing of recovery plans to ensure that they meet business requirements.
- Automate site recovery and migration processes to ensure fast, reliable recovery.
- Streamline planned migrations and preventive failovers.
Cloud Service Provisioning
VMware vCloud Automation Center
Self-Service and Policy-Enabled Cloud Service Provisioning
VMware vCloud Automation Center enables customers to rapidly deploy and provision cloud services in the vCloud Suite. Acting as a service governor, it provides a cross-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), storefront to help enforce business and IT policies throughout the service lifecycle.
- Leverages vCloud Director environments to benefit from policy-based virtual datacenters built on pooled infrastructure resources and software-define networking, security, storage and availability services.
- Full lifecycle management of existing and newly provisioned cloud compute resources.
- Secure self-service portal for requesting new infrastructure services as well as managing existing compute resources from predefined user-specific menus.
- Intelligent resource management to help ensure higher utilization through placement, prevention and reclamation of resources across virtual and physical servers.
Learn more about VMware vCloud Automation Center
VMware vFabric Application Director
Accelerated and Automated Application Provisioning for vSphere Enabled Cloud
Accelerate and automate the configuration and deployment of multi-tier applications across private and public cloud infrastructures.
- Application blueprints: intuitive drag and-drop canvas for quickly creating visual blueprints of application deployment topologies.
- Standardized OS and middleware templates: A customizable catalog, pre-populated with standard application components and scripts, allowing easy reuse when constructing new application topologies.
- Flexible cloud deployments: blueprints can be reused on multiple virtual and vSphere enabled cloud infrastructures.
- Deployment profiles: govern settings such as cloud templates, networks and application configuration values allowed for use in specific deployment environments
- Automatically generated deployment execution plans: perform quality and compliance reviews before deployments are executed for regulated applications.
- Native integration with VMware vCloud Director: automate the deployment of virtual infrastructure alongside application deployment.
- Pre-instrumented application performance management: automatic publishing of deployment changes to vFabric Application Performance Manager simplifies monitoring of health and availability of business critical applications.
Cloud Operations Management
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite
Automated Performance, Capacity, Configuration and Compliance Management for Dynamic Clouds
Ensure service levels, regulatory and best practice compliance and optimum resource utilization in heterogeneous and hybrid cloud environments through integrated performance, capacity and configuration management.
- Operations management dashboard and proactive smart alerts: comprehensive, at-a-glance visibility into the health, risk and efficiency of your cloud infrastructure.
- Automated root cause analysis of performance problems: analyze millions of metrics to identify the cause and effect of performance problems across your infrastructure.
- Correlation of performance and change events: quickly understand and remediate performance issues arising from configuration changes.
- Capacity planning, reporting and optimization: identify areas of reclaimable waste and chronic capacity shortfalls and optimize VM density.
- Continuous compliance: detect, remediate and enforce configuration standards to maintain a compliant infrastructure.
- Discovery and visualization of application and infrastructure dependencies: application-level awareness to help ensure service levels and disaster recovery protection for all critical application services.
- Integrated cost metering and reporting: visibility into resource utilization and the financial value of consumed resources.
Cloud Business Management
VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager**
Cost Visibility and Policy-driven Accountability for Virtual and Cloud Infrastructures
Enable administrators to deliver IT as a service with a simple, flexible and accurate chargeback/showback model.
- Customized chargeback hierarchy: define how virtual machines and VMware vSphere hosts are assigned to and shared by different departments, cost centers or business units in an organization.
- Flexible pricing models and billing policies: enable IT to measure fixed costs, allocated costs, actual utilization or a mix of all three, tracking and billing costs by business unit or group, based on the chargeback maturity of your organization.
- Simplified analysis and reporting: gain visibility through summary and comparison reports of costs and resource usage leveraging customizable report templates and automated report delivery.
- Meter resources in vCenter Server and vCloud Director: charge for standard resources like vCPU, Storage and Memory, and for advanced resources like tiered storage, network traffic, and other services (e.g. DHCP, NAT, firewall).
- Automated chargeback hierarchies gain immediate visibility into organizations, virtual datacenters, and vApps with automated creation of vCloud Director hierarchies in vCenter Chargeback Manager.
- Integration with vCenter Operations Manager: provide visibility to possible cost savings from reclaiming wasted Cloud resources and cost projections for forecasted capacity needed.
- Integration with IT Business Management Suite: provide virtual and cloud infrastructure cost information to achieve end-to-end IT cost visibility in the IT Business Management Suite.
*VMware vCenter Server and its accompanying vCenter Orchestrator are a separate purchase and are not included in the vCloud Suite.
**VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager is part of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite.
