Tenancy is Critical on a Cloud Platform

With this new VMWare platform, it was ultimately decided to go with ESXi hypervisors, managed by vCenter, and NSX-T.  

During the POC, it was pointed out that this combination of solutions had some improvements and enhancements over OpenStack (DRS, vMotion, et al). But one thing seemed to be overlooked, and we pointed it out: Tenancy

VMWare attempts to address Tenancy with Vertical Stack point solutions, like vCloud Director (positioned at Service Providers), or vRealize Automation. The latter, is going through a complete transformation in its latest version.  These solutions are also expensive. And, if you don't have the budget, what are your options??

One option is to set up Resource Pools and Folders in vCenter. Not the cleanest solution because you cannot set policies, workflows, etc.

What else can you do? Well, you can use a Cloud Management solution.

We had Cloudify as an Orchestrator. And we evaluated that as a Cloud Management solution. But what we found in the end, was that Cloudify excelled at complex orchestration, but it was not designed and built, ground-up, to be a Cloud Management Platform.

It seemed that this (lack of) Tenancy seemed to become apparent to everyone all at once - once the platform came up on VMWare.  And, with Cloudify we lacked the Blueprint development to do the scores to hundreds of tasks that we needed to have. It needed integrations with NSX-T, vCenter, and a host of other solutions.

We looked at a couple of other solutions, and settled on a solution called Morpheus.

I will blog a bit more about Morpheus in upcoming posts. I have been very hands-on with it lately.