As discussed in Chapter 1, Evolution of VMware vSphere Suite, VMware is pushing the software-defined model, and to do so it’s trying to standardize the design of the on-premises and public cloud infrastructures as much as possible. This could be done on-premises by using building blocks and common management services.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the integrated cloud infrastructure platform used to help build the SDDC VMware’s vision and make hybrid clouds effective. VMware Cloud Foundation provides a dynamic software-defined infrastructure where computing, storage, networking, and security resources can easily be managed and delivered to run enterprise workloads.

The core components of VMware Cloud Foundation are—VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and the VMware SDDC Manager used to automate the entire system life cycle for the infrastructure, to simplify the operations tasks, and to provide central management for on-premises and on-cloud resources.

A VMware Cloud Foundation based solution can be designed in different ways:

• Build your own: Using pre-qualified ready systems; usually vSAN ReadyNode
• As a product: Using integrated systems where VMware Cloud Foundation software stack is preinstalled and integrated on qualified hardware (for example, VCE VxRack System 1000 with SDDC nodes)
• As a service from the public cloud: In this case, you can run VMware Cloud Foundation as a service managed by public cloud providers

Using integrated systems becomes more common for large deployments, and also, if not combined with VMware Cloud Foundation, this building block approach remains valuable in those cases. Several prebuild stack solutions are available on the market, such as solutions from NetApp, Cisco, and so on (many will probably shift in the future to adopt VMware Cloud Foundation). In all those cases, the entire rack solution is designed and validated to satisfy specific business requirements, pre-sized for specific performance capabilities.