VMware Cloud Foundation™ provides a ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform for both traditional enterprise and modern applications. Based on a proven and comprehensive software-defined stack including VMware vSphere®, VMware VMware vSAN®, VMware NSX®, VMware vSphere® with VMware Tanzu™, and VMware vRealize® Suite, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, network, container and cloud management. The result is agile, reliable, efficient cloud infrastructure that offers consistent operations across private and public clouds.
By using VMware Cloud Foundation, data center cloud administrators to provision an application environment in a rapid, repeatable, automated way versus the traditional manual process.
VMware Cloud Foundation Components
To manage the logical infrastructure in the private cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation augments the VMware virtualization and management components with VMware Cloud Builder™ and VMware Cloud Foundation™ SDDC Manager™.
| VMware Cloud Foundation Component | Description |
|---|---|
| VMware Cloud Builder | VMware Cloud Builder automates the deployment of the software-defined stack, creating the first software-defined unit known as the management domain. |
| SDDC Manager | SDDC Manager automates the entire system life cycle, that is, from configuration and provisioning to upgrades and patching including host firmware, and simplifies day-to-day management and operations. From this interface, the virtual infrastructure administrator or cloud administrator can provision new private cloud resources, monitor changes to the logical infrastructure, and manage life cycle and other operational activities. |
| vSphere | vSphere uses virtualization to transform individual data centers into aggregated computing infrastructures that include CPU, storage, and networking resources. VMware vSphere manages these infrastructures as a unified operating environment and provides you with the tools to administer the data centers that participate in that environment. The two core components of vSphere are ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the virtualization platform where you create and run virtual machines and virtual appliances. vCenter Server is the service through which you manage multiple hosts connected in a network and pool host resources. |
| vSAN | vSAN aggregates local or direct-attached data storage devices to create a single storage pool that is shared across all hosts in the vSAN cluster. Using vSAN removes the need for external shared storage, and simplifies storage configuration and virtual machine provisioning. Built-in policies allow for flexibility in data availability. |
| NSX | NSX is focused on providing networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for emerging application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoint environments and technology stacks. NSX supports cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds, and multiple clouds. |
| vSphere with Tanzu | By using the integration between VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation, you can deploy and operate the compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for vSphere with Tanzu, also called Workload Management. vSphere with Tanzu transforms vSphere to a platform for running Kubernetes workloads natively on the hypervisor layer. When enabled on a vSphere cluster, vSphere with Tanzu provides the capability to run Kubernetes workloads directly on ESXi hosts and to create upstream Kubernetes clusters within dedicated resource pools. |
| vRealize Suite | VMware Cloud Foundation supports automated deployment of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. You can then deploy and manage the life cycle of Workspace ONE Access and the vRealize Suite products (vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Automation, and vRealize Operations) by using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the heterogeneous data center and the hybrid cloud. It is designed to deliver and manage infrastructure and applications to increase business agility while maintaining IT control. It provides the most comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure. |
For a high-level deployment process, see Deployment Overview of VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware Cloud Foundation Features
The VMware Cloud Foundation features provide automated deployment and life cycle management of your SDDC, and enable provisioning of customer virtualized workloads and containers.
| VMware Cloud Foundation Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Automated Software Bring-Up | You prepare your environment for VMware Cloud Foundation by installing a baseline ESXi image on vSAN ReadyNodes. After the hosts are physically racked and cabled, VMware Cloud Foundation uses the physical network details you provide (such as DNS, IP address pool, and so on) to automate the bring-up and configuration of the software stack. During bring-up, the management domain is created on the four hosts you specified. When the bring-up process completes, you have a functional management domain and can start provisioning virtual infrastructure (VI) workload domains. |
| Simplified Resource Provisioning with Workload Domains | In VMware Cloud Foundation, a workload domains is a policy-based resource construct with specific availability and performance attributes. See Workload Domains in VMware Cloud Foundation. |
| Virtual Machines and Containers Onto the Same Platform | By using the VMware Tanzu integration with VMware Cloud Foundation, you can deploy and operate the compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for vSphere with Tanzu, also called Workload Management. vSphere with Tanzu transforms vSphere to a platform for running Kubernetes workloads natively on the hypervisor layer. When enabled on a vSphere cluster, vSphere with Tanzu provides the capability to run Kubernetes workloads directly on VMware ESXi™ hosts and to create upstream Kubernetes clusters within dedicated resource pools. The Kubernetes concept of namespace is integrated into vSphere and becomes the unit of management. By grouping VMs and containers into logical applications via namespaces, Virtual Infrastructure (VI) admins who used to manage thousands of VMs can now manage just dozens of applications which is a massive reduction in cognitive load. For more information about integrating VMware Cloud Foundation with vSphere with Tanzu, see Developer Ready Infrastructure for VMware Cloud Foundation. |
| Automated Life Cycle Management | VMware Cloud Foundation offers automated life cycle management on a per-workload basis. Available updates for all components are tested for interoperability and bundled with the necessary logic for proper installation order. The update bundles are then scheduled for automatic installation on a per-workload domain basis. This allows administrators to target specific workloads or environments, for example development vs. production, for updates independent from the rest of the environment. vSphere Lifecycle Manager, a vCenter Server service, is integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation. By using vSphere Lifecycle Manager, you can create cluster images for centralized and simplified life cycle management of ESXi hosts including firmware. When you select the image-based life cycle management mode at VI workload domain creation, you can update and upgrade the ESXi version on all hosts in the cluster collectively. You can also install and update vendor add-ons and components on all ESXi hosts in a cluster. See vSphere Lifecycle Manager Image Management. |
| Stretched Deployment | You can set up two availability zones in your environment and introduce high availability of management and customer workloads by configuring vSAN stretched clusters by using the SDDC Manager API. Availability zones protect against failures of groups of hosts. These group can consist of hosts in the same data center, for example, installed in different racks, chassis or rooms, or in different data centers with low-latency high-speed links connecting them. Using two availability zones can improve availability of management components running the SDDC, minimize downtime of services, and improve SLAs. See Stretched Cluster Management. |
| NSX Federation | You can use NSX Federation to propagate configurations that span multiple NSX instances in a single VMware Cloud Foundation instance or across multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances. You can set up global networking, enabling failover of segment ingress and egress traffic between VMware Cloud Foundation instances, and implement a unified firewall configuration. In the management domain in a deployment with multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances, you use NSX to provide cross-instance services to SDDC management components which do not have native support for availability at several locations, such as vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations. In a management domain, you can use NSX Federation only to connect to the management domains of other VMware Cloud Foundation instances. Avoid connecting a management domain with VI workload domains in a single NSX Federation instance. You configure NSX Federation in VMware Cloud Foundation manually. For more information on using NSX Federation with VMware Cloud Foundation, see NSX Design for VMware Cloud Foundation and Working with NSX Federation in VMware Cloud Foundation. |
| VMware Cloud Foundation+ | You can connect your on-premises deployments to VMware Cloud by using a VMware Cloud Foundation+ subscription. By connecting VMware Cloud Foundation to the cloud, you use a simplified subscription model and keyless entitlement across multiple on-premises deployments. You also have access to administrator services, such as inventory management, infrastructure monitoring and virtual machine provisioning centrally from VMware Cloud Console. See What is VMware Cloud Foundation+?. |
