Customer Concern 

The customer engaged Rabun Enterprise Solutions to implement a VMware IaaS self-service platform that would allow around 120 customers to deploy virtual machines, load balancers, firewall rules, and storage on-demand. The customer chose utilizing the VMware stack including vSphere vCenter and ESXi, vSAN, vCloud Director, and NSX-T.  The customer did have some engineers on staff who were well versed in managing vSphere, but no experience installing and configuring vCloud Director.

The customer was concerned about each consumer utilizing a secure virtual machine and networking infrastructure that isolated the student’s workloads from other workloads.  The required a new network be created for each student along with micro segmentation rules.  By utilizing vCloud director, each student had their own login to the portal and were granted access to deploy machines, networks, and storage.

The customer did have some engineers on staff who were well versed in managing vSphere, but no experience installing and configuring vCloud Director.

Key Target Issues 

Infrastructure

• The customer needed a hypervisor solution with integrated network storage (vSAN). The customer was already a VMware customer, so using vSphere would integrate with existing processes and management tools.  The customer utilized Dell hardware (VSAN ready nodes) for the workloads to run ESXi and required integration with existing Dell Open Manage Enterprise tooling.

Self-service functionality

• 120 engineers needed on-demand access to spin up virtual machines with inherited security policies. These students (engineers) required new networks for each student and also needed access to load balancing, micro segmentation, and storage self-service.

Virtual Networking

• The consumers of vCloud director needed to be able to create networks on demand with inherited microsegmentation rules.  They also needed to be able to create load balancer VIPs and other networking services.  vCloud Director from VMware was the perfect choice and integration with this environment.

Solutions

VMware vCenter, VSAN, ESXi 

After reviewing the reference architecture and documenting final deployment architecture, the team implemented vSphere vCenter and ESXi with VMware vSAN as the storage platform. This scale-out architecture allowed the customer to scale-out or scale-up as needed while having a solid upgrade path.  vSAN also eliminated the need for FC arrays and FC switches or NFS/IP-based storage devices.  This overall architecture is a great way to deploy a new environment without introducing legacy devices.

NSX implementation 

Rabun Enterprise Solutions’ engineering team followed the NSX reference architecture during the deployment and utilized NSX for microsegmentation and virtual networking capabilities.  NSX was an all-in-one networking solution for the customer’s need by providing network, firewalling, micro segmentation, and load balancing capabilities.

vCloud Director 

Rabun Enterprise Solutions deployed vCloud Director and integrated with vSphere and NSX to allow self-service capabilities for around 120 students. This deployment allowed the customer to provide the consumers a fast and secure methodology for infrastructure as a service while also maintaining CPU, memory, and networking guardrails.  Operationally, this reduce the time to onboard the students and allowed quick deployment by the students without staff intervention.

Conclusions

The customer quickly utilized this deployed turn-key solution to quickly advance the technology utilization without having to send a number of engineers to training. This allowed the customer to focus on the adoption and utilization of these products and provided a stable platform for the engineering team to learn from.  This solution also integrated with existing management.