How It Works
Speed Access to Resources and Applications
vCloud Suite provides everything you need for a datacenter that delivers the promised agility of a private or hybrid cloud.
Enable self-service and automated, policy-based provisioning. A secure portal enables customized, self-service provisioning of cloud services that comply with established business policies. Authorized administrators, developers or business users can request new IT services as well as manage existing computer resources from predefined user-specific menus. Business-aware governance and control allows users to apply their own way of doing business to the cloud without changing organizational processes or policies. Standardized service blueprints and zero-touch process automation cut service delivery times from days to minutes while lowering operational costs.
Enable self-service deployment for multitier applications in vSphere enabled clouds. Through the creation of logical application blueprints leveraging pre-approved, standardized OS and middleware components, modern and traditional applications can be modeled and provisioned quickly and easily. A customizable catalog, pre-populated with standard application components and scripts, allows easy reuse when constructing new application topologies. This unique model driven approach dramatically reduces deployment time leading to increased agility and operational efficiency while maintaining IT control.
Simplify the delivery of IT resources. Compute, storage, networking, and security services are abstracted, pooled, and combined with automated provisioning, creating "virtual datacenter" containers that dramatically simplify the delivery of IT resources. For the first time, all infrastructure services are freed from the constraints of physical hardware configuration. Manual processes and repetitive administrative tasks are minimized, reducing application deployment time from days to a few minutes. VMware vApp templates capture requirements for compute, storage, networking, and other custom guest data, enabling rapid, dynamic provisioning of infrastructure from aggregate software-defined resource pools. This template-based approach also allows applications to be flexibly ported between datacenters.
Expand the capacity available to business units both on and off premise. Rather than being tied to underlying physical hardware, software-defined networking and security adapt, scale, and “travel” with each workload. This makes it easy to quickly deploy, move, and scale applications and data based on business needs. Automated, policy-driven provisioning allows VMs to draw on resources anywhere in the datacenter—across clusters, pods, and even geographically separated sites. Auto-deploy capabilities enable workloads to be scaled on demand, even to multiple clusters, ensuring the highest hardware utilization and the ability to accommodate workload-specific demand spikes.
Simplify and Automate Operations Management
As the datacenter becomes more virtualized and dynamic, traditional management tools designed for static physical infrastructure are no longer effective. vCloud Suite dramatically speeds and simplifies operations with integrated performance, capacity and configuration management. Smart alerts and patented analytics give you the intelligence and visibility to proactively optimize IT operations for health, compliance and efficiency.
Gain comprehensive visibility into operations. vCloud Suite provides unprecedented productivity gains by greatly simplifying the process of monitoring and managing service levels in a dynamic cloud infrastructure. Super metrics for health, risk and efficiency describe the true performance of infrastructure and applications and provide an at-a-glance view of what is impacting operations at the datacenter, cluster or application level before users are impacted. Proactive management of the environment means fewer incidents and less time spent troubleshooting performance problems.
Proactively ensure performance. vCloud Suite provides the comprehensive visibility and intelligent automation you need to efficiently ensure quality of service. Performance data is collected and analyzed, abnormalities detected and root causes of problems identified across all infrastructure layers, before end users are impacted..
Enforce continuous compliance. Configuration management capabilities automatically assess and report on the compliance status of your virtual infrastructure and operating systems, as well as the impact of planned or unplanned changes. You get out-of-the-box compliance policies for most of today’s common business standards, including PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Unlike traditional tools that limit themselves to out-of-compliance reporting, vCloud Suite offers a simple, one-click procedure to quickly remediate issues and bring a system back into compliance.
Intelligently plan and optimize capacity. Accurately assess and forecast capacity needs – CPU, memory, network, and storage—to ensure that appropriate resources levels are delivered when and where needed. You can right-size virtual machines to increase consolidation ratios, reduce costs and optimize both computing power and your VMware investment. Advanced capacity analytics identify idle VMs and automate reclamation to help avoid VM sprawl. Use powerful capacity modeling with “what if” scenarios to fine-tune your infrastructure spend, balancing cost with performance and risk. Cost metering capabilities give you a window into the financial value of consumed resources, providing line-of-business owners with cost transparency and accountability.
Monitor your applications. To facilitate comprehensive visibility and proactive management of service levels of business critical applications the vCloud Suite provides monitoring of Windows and Linux operating systems as well as application servers, middleware and database technologies from Microsoft and Oracle. You can see when performance bottlenecks are starting to build so you can take corrective actions before end users even notice. Automated discovery of application dependencies enable you to track down every single component of an application to ensure full disaster recovery protection
Deliver the Best SLAs for All Applications
Ultimately, IT is driven by applications and each has different needs. vCloud Suite equips you to dependably deliver the performance attributes, security defenses and disaster recovery protection required for every workload, including business-critical systems and low-latency, I/O-sensitive applications.
Assure performance and availability. With policy-driven deployment, you can provision the virtual infrastructure appropriately to supply the right SLAs for each application—minimizing implementation time and human error. Automatic, storage-aware load balancing determines the best place for virtual machine data to live, and inbound web traffic is efficiently managed across VM clusters to safeguard the performance and availability of web services. With live VM migration, server and storage maintenance can be performed free from planned downtime or disruption. Robust high availability capabilities - included with VMware vSphere - are simple to set up and apply to every application. Should a node or server ever fail, all its VMS are automatically restarted on another host, with no downtime or loss of data.
Provide adaptive, virtualization-aware security. vCloud Suite lets you create software-defined networks that scale with applications and apply security services exactly where needed without hardware upgrades. Virtual perimeters are protected with a simple and operationally efficient security services gateway. An edge virtual appliance provides integrated services such as NAT, load balancing, VPN and DHCP. Critical applications are secured and isolated with highly available, virtualization-aware firewalls and adaptive trust zones. Logging and auditing controls accelerate IT compliance through increased visibility and management of virtual machine network security. You can also readily integrate best-of-breed third-party security solutions via vCloud Suite’s open architecture and standard APIs.
Gain automated, reliable and testable disaster recovery for every application. Cost-efficiently extend disaster recovery protection to all your applications with vCloud Suite. Replace complex, error-prone runbooks with a simple, automated and centralized recovery plan. Ensure fast and reliable recovery by automating the failover process and testing your failover plans frequently without impacting production systems.
