Looking for secure, agile, high-performance infrastructure to migrate and modernize your VMware workloads? Enjoy fast provisioning and improved networking throughput with Bare Metal Servers for VPC. 

The recently announced IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC is an exciting addition to the existing comprehensive set of capabilities offered by IBM Cloud for extending and migrating your on-premises VMware deployments to IBM Cloud. 

Bare Metal for VPC enables you to rapidly provision dedicated compute capacity to host VMware workloads in the IBM Cloud VPC. The new solution provides native integration with IBM Cloud VPC and IBM Cloud interconnectivity services to ease up networking and to support using your own IP addresses together with your workloads. 

With Bare Metal for VPC, you have the flexibility to design a VMware deployment for your needs as a fully integrated solution with the IBM Cloud VPC networking constructs. By using these improved capabilities, you can easily benefit from other IBM cloud-native services by running these side-by-side with your migrated VMware workloads.  

Architecture

See below for the architecture overview of VMware with NSX-T on IBM Cloud VPC: 

The IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server is integrated with the VPC network, and you can take advantage of the network, storage and security capabilities provided by IBM Cloud VPC. Optionally, use VMware vSAN™ for storage and VMware NSX-T™ for network capabilities. 

You can easily and quickly add and remove ESXi hosts, and you can also add, configure and remove VMware vSphere® clusters as you like. If your storage needs grow, you can add and attach IBM Cloud VPC file shares*. For common services like NTP and DNS, you can use IBM Cloud VPC native services and solutions. 

After the bare metal server provisioning and initial VMware configurations, you can access and manage the IBM-hosted environment. You’ll have full support and access to use VMware clients, command line interface (CLI), existing scripts or other familiar vSphere API-compatible tools. These options can be combined with IBM Cloud automation solutions, including IBM Cloud Terraform provider with IBM Cloud Schematics.

For connectivity needs, you can use IBM Cloud VPC and IBM Cloud interconnectivity solutions in the following ways: 

• Public internet network access capabilities: The options include floating IP addresses and Public Gateway configurations within your VPC.
• On-premises connectivity over public internet: This can be arranged by IBM Cloud VPC VPN services (site-to-site and client-to-site) or, alternatively, NSX-T built-in capabilities. 
• Private networking: You can use IBM Cloud interconnectivity services to connect your VMware workloads with IBM Cloud classic infrastructure, other VPCs and on-premises networks.

Key benefits

The architecture provides the fundamental building blocks, including VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware NSX-T. You can combine these with flexible storage options, such as VMware vSAN™ for dedicated storage, IBM Cloud VPC file share for growing storage capacity or IBM Cloud Object Storage for backups and long-term storage needs. These building blocks provide you with flexible and scalable needs for a VMware software-defined data center solution.

VMware Solutions in IBM Cloud VPC have the following key benefits over IBM Cloud classic deployments:

• IBM Cloud VPC gives you the ability to easily and rapidly define and control a virtual network that is logically isolated from all other tenants. The logical isolation is implemented by using virtual network functions and security that is built into the platform.
• Provisioning the IBM Cloud bare metal server on IBM Cloud VPC takes minutes — instead of hours — when compared to bare metal servers in IBM Cloud Classic infrastructure.
• VMware workloads running in IBM Cloud VPC can take advantage of all functions for VPC networking capabilities and other IBM Cloud interconnectivity services.

With this single-tenant IBM Cloud bare metal server infrastructure in IBM Cloud VPC, you can quickly deploy network, compute and storage capacity for your VMware environment in minutes.

Unlike the managed service offerings, this architecture gives you the flexibility to design a solution for your needs, and it provides you full and complete access to all components.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC features at a glance

• 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8260 CPUs
• Available in compute, balanced and memory profiles
• 10-minute rapid provisioning priced hourly
• User-managed virtualization, full VMware ESXi 7.0 support
• 100 Gbps uplinks with SmartNIC technology
• Security groups and network access control lists (ACLs)
• Create multiple private clouds in multi-zone regions (MZRs)
• All NVMe-based secondary storage: 8x and 16x JBOD 3.2TB NVMe u.2 local options
• Enhanced networking functions supporting multi-FIP, VXLAN and no-NAT IP addressing

Learn more

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC offers the benefits of dedicated bare metal servers with faster provisioning, flexible network design and improved performance. This solution takes the single tenancy, consistency and security of powerful bare metal servers to a new level, and introduces more quality-of-life improvements. In addition to the compute, networking and storage advantages through the native VPC presence, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC unlocks larger core and memory profiles, client-managed virtualization and an average of 4x faster network performance without the need for gateways or tunnels to connect with Classic infrastructure and other VPCs.

Learn more about VMware VPC Roll Your Own Architecture.

Follow a tutorial on deploying VMware on IBM Cloud VPC Bare Metal Servers.

*IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC is available by allow-list only, with certain feature limitations. See here to learn more.