Date: December 22, 2017
Author: 11:11 Systems
Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
At VMworld 2016, VMware launc
hed the concept of VMware native workloads running on bare metal (using vSphere/vCenter) in the Amazon AWS public clouds.
At VMworld 2017, this service went live in the AWS US-West region and more recently in the US-East.
We have often said (and blogged on this site) that there is not much value in going through the pain of migrating VMware workloads into the public clouds (and the virtual machine conversion required) “just because.” You need to be moving them for some pretty good reasons (and maybe you have some).
It makes a lot more sense to have those VMware VMs be able to take part in a forward-looking transformation that will no doubt involve many of the new shiny things available in the public clouds. Perhaps your business is looking at new ways of developing and scaling applications, or the use of containers and container management, such as Kubernetes, or even machine learning, AI, server-less and even database-less computing — you name it.
Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has been talking about the possibility of running VMware workloads on bare metal within Azure data centers. VMware retorted by saying that they would not support this. Microsoft has since responded by saying that they are working with one or more VMware Cloud Provider Program partners who will run Cisco/NetApp Flexpod systems in co-location within or adjacent to the Azure data centers.
So, is this something new? Not really. Here at 11:11 Systems, we’ve been doing this with our customers for quite a while — and we offer several ways of doing it.
From the outset, we’ve chosen data center partners who are carrier-neutral. They provide on-net connectivity with many telecoms providers for swift on-boarding, and then provide high-speed, low latency connectivity where it’s needed. In many of our data center locations, we are in the same building or campus as the hyperscale public cloud providers, and it is easy to obtain a fiber cross-connect between our tenant edge and the public cloud tenant edge.
In terms of capability, 11:!1 System offers:
- Multi-tenanted public cloud based on VMware vCloud Director using our innovative cloud console
- Private cloud using vCloud Director with dedicated blade servers and dedicated storage access
- Bare metal blades and private shared storage to run VMware vSphere as if on-premises
- Co-location capability to “bring your own servers” to include hyper-converged infrastructures, such as VXrail or Nutanix
All this can then be a couple of network hops away from the public clouds, using either IPsec VPN over the internet (but a very short distance) or taking advantage of DirectConnect or ExpressRoute as discussed above.
As we suggested in our recent blog post, 2018 looks to be an interesting year for multi-cloud services, but remember that it might be wise not to put all your eggs in one basket, when leveraging cloud services.
