With the adoption of VMware Cloud, it’s expected that several of the organization’s existing operational processes will remain consistent and intact in the public cloud. This is part of the value proposition of the service. It is critical for an operations team to understand the VMware Cloud management domains in detail to cohesively evaluate the capabilities and identify any nuances or new areas that could introduce operational gaps.
The day-to-day management of VMware Cloud will typically focus on the following areas:
Lifecycle Management–
Updates to the SDDC software are necessary to maintain the health and availability of the VMC service. The VMware Cloud provider will share notifications of upcoming SDDC lifecycle management activities. Customers will monitor, review, and manage the patching and upgrade schedule to the SDDC (review release notes and provide forward looking change notifications to internal teams). This includes vSphere ESXi, vSAN, NSX, and VMware management components.
Considerations
The organization must review existing policies and processes for lifecycle management and how they can be adapted for VMware Cloud. This includes the scheduling of VMware Cloud patching and updates, version control between on-prem and VMware Cloud for compatibility, identification of components not included in the scheduled VMware Cloud patching processes and defining validation processes applied before and after patching has occurred.
vCenter Management
VMware Clouds are provisioned with VMware vCenter Server. After deployment customers are provided with credentials to manage the core vCenter Logical Constructs (Folder Structures, Alarms, Tags etc), Roles and Responsibilities, and the vCenter Content Library.
Considerations
Review existing processes for managing vCenter and how this can be adapted for VMware Cloud. This includes the management of Content Libraries, core vCenter logical constructs (Datastores, Alarms, etc) and vCenter integration between on-prem and VMware Cloud (if supported).
