An Overview of my experience with VMware Cloud Foundation Solution offering from VMware.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
VMware Cloud Foundation serves as a complete set of software-defined Compute, Storage, Networking, and security solution. Hence it serves as a cloud-ready platform for creating and managing On Premise cloud solutions. Hence as an organization, I have a solution that reduces the complexities of licenses at the same time I do have a cloud-ready solution from a single vendor. Thus reducing cost giving me a single OEM window to cater to my current and upcoming solution at a reasonable cost
Pros
- Cloud enabled Solution.
- Support Container based Apps.
- Cost efficient.
- Supports both Public and Private Environments.
Cons
- The Deployment is complex.
- Recommended Number of Physical Nodes is three or more; with less than 3 Nodes, it becomes difficult to install V-SAN.
- Need for better integration. If we go on the public cloud, it is a huge challenge while integrate with an open source platform.
- Cost can be marginally reduced. SMB segments still prefer a separate license instead of VCF, or they postpone their purchase plans.
Return on Investment
- My organization has a size of 1300+ employees, using multiple applications and an exchange mail server that is hosted on On-Premise Cloud, hence scalability has not been a challenge.
- Having hosted my Production environment and Mail exchange Server on VCF, there has been optimum resource utilization with very little scope downtime. Hence have been able to save a lot of funds on Hardware resources.
- Due to the size of my organization and due the data load, I have been able to save on Resource Utilization and Organization Funds
Other Software Used
Cisco Intersight, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services