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VMware on IBM Cloud

Seamlessly migrate and modernize VMware workloads to the cloud IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions. Leverage your existing investments for a consistent VMware experience—retaining the same level of access, security and control.

You can manage it yourself or having IBM manage it for you.

Key challenges

Challenges and solution

  • Extend, migrate and scale. Easily extend your on-premises data center to address capacity expansion, on-demand app scaling, and accelerating cloud migrations of vSphere workloads to IBM Cloud—without re-architecting applications and while reducing migration complexity. See more about deploying new or existing workloads.
  • Cyber resiliency and recovery. IBM Cloud’s Cyber Resiliency and Recovery solution provides a simplified business continuity plan with cost-effective disaster recovery (DR), Cloud backup, and a robust ransomware recovery solution to protect and restore your data across your IT environment. See IBM Cloud Cyber Recovery Solutions.
  • Cloud VDI (DaaS). Build your VDI or DaaS environment on IBM Cloud to deliver an enhanced user experience to your remote workforce and your partners, without sacrificing on security or performance. See Desktop as a service (DaaS)
  • Application modernization. Modernize your VMware workloads with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes containers. Improve business outcomes with advanced technologies such as AI and blockchain. Integrate existing VMware-based applications into a hybrid cloud strategy. See Application modernization.
  • Data security for regulated workloads. This offering includes a secure-by-default architecture that follows IBM's unique policy controls framework, it provides continuous compliance monitoring, and the highest level of data encryption (FIPS 140-2 Level 4). See VMware Regulated Workloads overview.

Use case comparison

The following diagram describes the IBM offerings and their main use cases.

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere VMware as a Service VMware Shared VMware Regulated Workloads
Customer-managed, fully configured, and scalable VMware vCenter with NSX-T instance, built and optimized for IBM Cloud Customizable VMware-compatible hardware for maximum flexibility IBM-managed VMware Cloud Director instance with IBM Cloud bare metal servers, offering dedicated and scalable compute, network, and storage IBM-managed VMware Cloud Director instance, offering virtual servers with cost-effective and flexible capacity and scalability includes a secure-by-default architecture that follows the IBM® unique policy controls framework. It also includes continuous compliance monitoring and the highest level of data encryption FIPS 140-2 Level 4
Clients who want to leverage the speed and consistency of automation for deploying environment and adding capacity while maintaining the same level of control and visibility as they enjoy on-premises. Clients who want to start as small as a single bare metal host and design their own VMware environment that is hosted in the IBM Cloud, while maintaining the same level of control and visibility as on-premises.
  • Workloads that require consistent performance related to using dedicated infrastructure
  • Optimized host configuration for the use case (balanced, compute-intensive, storage-intensive)
  • Clients who want to manage their capacity at the host level directly
  • Clients who want to offload the burden of maintaining the VMware environment to IBM
  • Paying for what you use and need precisely to the GB of memory and vCPU
  • Starting small and scaling up as you need
  • Standby disaster recovery site
  • Cloud bursting during peak demands
  • Clients who want to offload the burden of maintaining the VMware environment and capacity management to IBM
 The IBM Cloud® for VMware® Regulated Workloads architecture is an extension of the VMware vCenter Server® offering.
The design extends and enhances the basic VMware vCenter Server® architecture to deliver a secure, high-performance platform. Clients are able to run both classic virtualized workloads and containerized applications with the addition of Red Hat® OpenShift®.
VMware on Classic VMware on Classic or VMware on VPC VMware as a Service VMware Shared VMware Regulated Workloads

For more details, see Compare offerings.

Offering summary diagram

The following diagram offers a comparison:

comparison

Secure VMware disks on IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud offers integrated VMware solutions. Each virtual machine you stand up has storage coupled to it, which you may want to encrypt. These VMs may host applications and data that contain sensitive information, so you would need to lock it down.

You can encrypt this storage via highly secure, industry-standard algorithms. But this can lead to a key management concern: Where do you keep the keys, and how do you secure them? You can now configure a tight integration between IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services (HPCS) and VMware on IBM Cloud.

For more information, see the tutorial at Use IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services to encrypt VMware disks.

Next steps

See:

See product documentation:

VMware vSphere

VMware vCloud Director solutions

Reference