IaaS by VMware: VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) stands in one line with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud or other cloud offerings. I don’t want to compare the different provider with vCHS. To be honest: This article is more a summary for myself, than really new content. I just want to summarize information about the IaaS offering of VMware. If you want a comparison of vCHS and AWS, I recommend to read this article written by Alex Mattson (AHEAD).

Introducing VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS)

VMware vCHS isn’t a tasty cheese (please DON’T pronounce it “vCheese”…), it’s a public cloud IaaS offering by VMware. And because public cloud concepts are no cheese, you should stick your nose into it more closely. VMware vCHS is built with the same VMware products that you’re using in your private datacenter. Because of this vCHS is compatible to your private VMware environment and you can move VMs between your private datacenter and VMware vCHS. You can use vCHS to move workloads to a public cloud environment, or you can use it to start a new deployment. Sure you can move workloads vom vCHS to your private datacenter.

Core Compute Services

VMware offers two core compute services: Dedicated Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud. Both provide a pool of compute, storage and networking resources. Dedicated Cloud is, as the name says, dedicated to a single-tenant, physically isolated with a dedicated management stack. 100% of the resources are reserved and can be allocated depending on customer needs. The customer can assign the resources to virtual dedicated clouds. Each virtual dedicated cloud provides individual access and control over the resources. Virtual Private Cloud is multi-tenant and logical isolated. The infrastructure is shared among several tenants. The virtual private cloud is ideal for testing or peak workloads. Both core services can be extended by various options. CPU, memory, storage and IP addresses can be added in increments to both compute services.

Business Continuity

VMware offers two services to protect your private and cloud-based VMs: vCHS Disaster Recovery and vCHS Data Protection. vCHS Disaster Recovery is based on vSphere Replication. With vCHS Disaster Recovery you can replicate VMs from your private datacenter into your vCHS environment, regardsless if you have a dedicated cloud or virtual private cloud. vCHS Data Protection is used to protect the VMs, that are running in your vCHS dedicated cloud or virtual private cloud environment.

Management Tools & Networking

Beside the core compute services and services like vCHS Disaster Recovery and vCHS Data Protection, VMware offers, and supports tools and applications to increase the value of vCHS. You can use the free vCloud Connector to migrate VMs from your VMware vSphere or vCloud environment to a vCHS dedicated cloud or virtual private cloud. VMware vCloud Automation Center can be used together with vCHS, e.g. users can provision multi-tier applications in vCHS by using vCAC self-service. vCHS takes care of the infrastructure deployment, vCAC controls the application deployment and enforces governance. With the vSphere Web Client Plug-in you can manage your private VMware environment and your vCHS environment through the same client. Offline Data Transfer (ODT) can be used for bulk uploads of VMs, templates, vApps etc. An encrypted device is provided by VMware to store the data for the transfer. Regarding networking VMware offers vCloud Hybrid Service Edge Gateway and Direct Connect. The edge gateways provides features like firewalling, NAT, IPSec VPN and load balancing. Director Connect provides high bandwidth (1 Gbps and 10 Gbps) connections to connect vCHS to your private datacenter. Direct Connect is a service provided by VMware and VMware Direct Connect partners.

Pricing

For pricing you should visit the vCHS Pricing & Comparison website, but to give you a clue: A virtual private cloud (20 GB, 5 Ghz, 2 TB storage, 10 Mbps bandwidth and 2 public IPs) costs ~ 1.200 € per month.

Final words

vCHS is a great product and there are dozens of use cases for it, e.g. disaster recovery with vSphere Replication. Good news for vExperts: VMware has re-launched the vExpert access to vCHS. Participants can use vCHS for 30 days. A great chance to demonstrate this to potential customers!