Helping service providers navigate the new VMware landscape

The decision is broader than selecting a licensing or hosting arrangement.

You need to understand how your customer commitments, current estate and future platform plans fit together. Decisions may include:

• Which customer environments can continue in their current form;
• Which environments require an upgrade, refresh or migration;
• How new customers and additional capacity will be supported;
• Which VMware versions remain supportable;
• Whether existing hardware has sufficient life and capacity;
• How platform security, patching and resilience will be maintained;
• Which operational responsibilities your team wants to retain;
• How and when customers need to be informed;
• What internal skills will be needed; and
• How the future model affects cost and margin.

These decisions are connected. A customer contract date may influence a migration timetable, while hardware age or capacity pressure may make one route more practical than another.

Starting early gives you time to map those dependencies before they restrict your options.

Redcentric has created Adopt, Consume and Evergreen as three practical routes to help service providers protect customer continuity, respond to new demand and plan for a more sustainable platform future. 

Each route addresses a different business need. They can be used independently or combined across your customer estate, giving you the flexibility to stabilise what you have today while planning proactively for what comes next. 

A provider may use one route across its estate or combine different routes based on customer requirements, platform lifecycle and future demand.

You do not have to apply one route to every customer or workload. The aim is to create a practical plan across the estate rather than force every customer through the same transition.

For example, you might use:

• Adopt may suit existing environments where continuity and protection of current investment are the priority.
• Consume may suit new demand or workloads that need capacity without further platform expansion.
• Evergreen may suit customers ready for a longer-term managed lifecycle and refresh model.

The right mix will depend on contract dates, platform position, available capacity, support requirements, future demand and commercial viability.

Access should reflect the responsibilities each organisation needs to perform.

The service design should define:

• Which platform functions Redcentric manages;
• Which customer and workload functions you manage;
• The permissions required by each team;
• How privileged access is controlled;
• How changes are approved;
• Who monitors and responds to alerts; and
• How incidents and escalations are handled.

The outcome should be a clear access and responsibility model that avoids duplicated effort or unowned tasks.

VMware Cloud Director environments require specific discovery because they often support customer segmentation, self-service and operational workflows as well as virtual machines.

The assessment should examine:

• Tenant structures;
• Self-service capabilities;
• Networking;
• Service catalogues;
• Automation and integrations;
• Administrative roles;
• Billing processes; and
• The customer experience.

The transition plan must account for how customers consume services today and identify what needs to be retained, replaced or redesigned.

The target route can only be confirmed once the current architecture, integrations and customer operating model have been understood.

VMware Cloud Foundation affects the broader private cloud platform, not only the hypervisor. VCF can provide a more integrated platform, but its capabilities also need to be operated, maintained and governed.

Depending on the target design, planning may need to cover:

• Compute, storage and networking;
• Hardware compatibility and capacity;
• Platform domains;
• Lifecycle and upgrades;
• Automation;
• Security and governance;
• Operational tooling;
• Administrative responsibilities; and
• Platform skills.

The assessment should determine which VCF capabilities are relevant and whether operating the platform internally remains the right long-term model.

Not necessarily.

The requirement depends on:

• Security and compliance;
• Performance and availability;
• Workload scale;
• Technical isolation;
• Network design;
• Data location; and
• Commercial viability.

Some workloads may suit shared Redcentric Cloud capacity. Others may require dedicated infrastructure or a tailored design. Technical discovery should determine the appropriate model.

Migration planning begins with the workload and its dependencies.

The assessment should consider:

• Application architecture;
• Databases;
• Storage;
• Networks and IP addressing;
• Identity and authentication;
• Integrations;
• Data volumes;
• Replication;
• Backup and recovery requirements;
• Acceptable downtime;
• Testing; and acceptance
• Rollback planning; and
• Customer communication.

Some workloads with suitable resilience and migration tooling may be moved with little visible disruption. Others may require a controlled migration window.

Redcentric would not make a blanket zero-downtime commitment without reviewing the application and its dependencies.

Supporting services must also be included in the transition design. This may cover backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, security, firewalls and connectivity, including who remains responsible for each area.