Choosing to migrate from an on-premises or cloud-native environment to VMware-on-Cloud is an important decision to make. You want to take advantage of cloud services, flexibility and savings; but once you’ve decided to take this step, what comes next?
Understanding your existing environment and your future business goals is key to successful cloud adoption. Assessing your current specific environment and modelling will help you partner with the best cloud provider that meets your needs and lays out a successful cloud adoption strategy.
Five key factors to consider
An important aspect of your cloud adoption journey is to decide where to host your VMware-on-Cloud workload. The cloud provider needs to meet your requirements while significantly lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Here are some critical factors to consider:
- Level of control: Enterprises seek privacy, compliance and security in the cloud. The level of control of the cloud environment determines whether you can manage your data privacy, security and compliance the way you require. Do you want unrestricted flexibility of the VMware environment to save CapEx while utilizing operations strength you already have?
- Regional availability: Another key factor in choosing a cloud provider is knowing your scalability and growth plans. Do you need a global scalable presence or are you looking for local regional concentration.?
- Maximum cluster size: The right cluster size helps you manage the uptime, higher availability and serviceability. This factor directly relates to the number of workloads, workload size and their chattiness. Do you have large workloads? Do you have large groups of interworking workloads? Knowing your workloads will define the cluster size that is right for you. This will help you decide which cloud provides you the right-sized cluster.
- Network traffic: Network bandwidth requirement is directly proportional to the expected network traffic in a hybrid cloud environment. The network bandwidth determines the costs associated with data transport. Who is bearing these costs? How much recurring network cost does it add to your TCO? This is an important factor in selecting a cloud provider.
- Flexibility of host models: The number of hosts required decides the recurring costs you will incur in a cloud environment. It becomes important to know if the cloud provider gives you the flexibility of host sizes, variety of models and granularity of host availability. This will directly impact your recurring costs and reduce your TCO.
Comparison across leading cloud platforms
There are multiple cloud providers to choose from — each with an array of VMware-on-Cloud configurations. Each cloud provider offers different features and benefits to stand out from the competition.
Understanding these features and how they relate to the intricacies of your workload is key for choosing the most cost-effective cloud platform. You can get a quick comparative view of VMware-on-Cloud of all leading cloud platforms and arrive at the best fit for your organization.
Modelling and right-sizing your cloud environment
A thorough pre-migration cloud modelling is necessary to visualize cost savings in the cloud, such as from right-sizing your cloud environment. This can save you 30-60% in cloud costs that would otherwise be wasted on over-provisioned VMs. Modelling your on-premises and future cloud environment by hand is time-consuming, painstaking and, in some cases, impossible.
A good modelling SaaS solution provides inventory of your on-premises infrastructure and allows you to perform scenario analysis to determine what is the most cost-effective cloud platform to migrate to. It also allows you to find hidden costs quickly and easily for each cloud platform you are considering.
Recarta IT & VMware
Our highly experienced Software team is accredited by VMware for Intel projects or PowerVM for Unix projects. Through our many years of experience we have identified the best ways to virtualise your environment and the best products for the best return of investment. Recarta can recommend and provide consultancy services to support your project- either with capacity planning, back-up or advising on application licensing on a virtualised server.
