Shared Responsibility Model

Whenever there are multiple groups working together on a system it is helpful to define roles and responsibilities. The Shared Responsibility Model does that for VMware Cloud, helping make clear who supports what components of a deployed SDDC.

Working from the bottom up, the public cloud provider handles the design, implementation, and operation of the physical computing environment, including servers, networking, power, and other obligations within their data center facilities. This also includes regulatory compliance certification of those components, where required.

From there, VMware manages the configurations of the physical equipment that the cloud provider supplies, as well as the relationship to the cloud provider themselves. VMware installs, maintains, secures, patches, and upgrades ESXi, vCenter Server, NSX, vSAN, and other infrastructure management components that are required for an SDDC. VMware does this seamlessly by using classic vSphere resiliency features, like DRS, HA, vMotion, and the like. Where outages may be noticed, such as with an update to vCenter Server, notifications will happen via email to SDDC administrators.

Customers handle the workloads, data, choices about availability, and the methods of accessing workloads and data over the network. VPN configurations, public IP addresses, and network security are managed by customers as well.