The Cloud Foundation on VxRail cloud platform in a data center has a transformational effect on the way IT resources are delivered to support applications and users. The deployment of a Cloud Foundation on VxRail cloud platform in your environment involves careful and deliberate planning and preparation to ensure an efficient and seamless deployment experience.

The Cloud Foundation on VxRail deployment life cycle starts before a purchase order is issued. In the initial phase, the business and operational requirements are captured and applied toward the overall solution. The requirements process captures the use cases for the planned Cloud Foundation on VxRail deployment. At this stage, decisions can be made about requirements such as site locations and availability. In addition, various organizations and business units are aligned with their application requirements to propose a high-level design. Dell Technologies specialists work jointly with the account team at this stage of the effort.

After acceptance of a high-level design and proposal, technologists and subject matter experts will join the effort. The applications and virtual machines targeted for the Cloud Foundation on VxRail platform are used in a sizing exercise to produce a detailed VxRail infrastructure bill-of-material needed to support the planned workload. Also, during this phase, the dependencies between the planned sets of applications for Cloud Foundation on VxRail are analyzed and used to produce a high-level network design. These requirements are then used as the baseline in the planning efforts for the upstream external network, and for the virtual networks in the management workload domain and the VI workload domains.

Figure 5.   Anatomy of a Cloud Foundation on VxRail management deployment

The bill of materials consists of the necessary hardware and software to meet the planning business objectives. At this stage, the planning and design phase for the management workload domain and subsequent workload domains can commence while the hardware is shipped from the factory for deployment in the target data centers. When the infrastructure is in place, and the detailed design and configuration settings are finalized, the Cloud Foundation on VxRail management workload domain is deployed on the VxRail clusters. The deployment of any subsequent workload domains depends on the successful deployment of the management workload domain.

Figure 6.        Anatomy of a Cloud Foundation on VxRail workload deployment

The deployment of a Cloud Foundation on VxRail VI workload domain starts with a sizing and requirements gathering exercise. This phase differs from the initial management workload domain exercise because the customer applications (as opposed to the management applications) are analyzed for consideration for sizing and resource requirements. When the necessary VxRail infrastructure is deployed in the data center, and the network is configured to support the applications targeted for the workload domain, you can deploy the workload domain with the underlying VxRail cluster infrastructure, and enable management access in the Cloud Foundation on VxRail management workload domain.