Public Cloud Powered by VMware

Earlier this year, we launched a new public cloud service powered by VMware!

In this article, we’ll discuss the new service, including its capabilities, advantages, and plans for future developments.

You may have already seen the announcements on our site. At the recent Selectel TechDay, presentations given by our staff and partners showcasing VMware technical solutions generated quite a buzz. This doesn’t come as a surprise: our corporate clientele is on the rise, and VMware is the defacto standard in enterprise virtualization.

The Service

The new Cloud powered by VMware is a cloud infrastructure (IaaS) built on the VMware vSphere and vCloud Director platforms. The service is used by allocating computing resources as a software-defined data center (SDDC) with remote VMware Cloud-based remote desktop. Clients are provided full access to the Organization and vDC from the vDirector control panel.

Three pools are available for each project:

• a disaster recovery pool at the storage level (Stretched vSAN)
• a high-speed disk pool (NVMe SSD)
• a hybrid disk pool (NVMe SSD and Enterprise HDD)

All 3 pools are located in St. Petersburg in our Dubrovka 3 and Tsvetochnaya 2 data centers.

The cloud is built on the latest VMware technology:

• vSphere virtualization
• vSAN data storage
• NSX network services

All hosts are built on Intel platforms and equipped with 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processors, Intel P series SSDs, and hybrid disk pools use HGST Enterprise SATA HDDs.

Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processors are part of the latest family of Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, have a six-channel memory controller, 24.75 MB L3 cache, and a base frequency of 2.3 GHz, which can be increased to 3.70 GHz in turbo mode.
NVME P series SSDs are the latest Intel server-line disks and provide the highest performance and reliability today.

The network infrastructure is built on hardware by Juniper and Brocade and uses Spine-and-Leaf architecture, providing high horizontal (VM network interaction) and vertical (external access) network performance.

Advantages

Let’s now look at what sets our Cloud powered by VMware apart from similar offers on the market.

High Performance

Using the latest Intel P4600 and P350 NVMe SSDs and vSAN architecture, we’ve achieved 160000 IOPS on Random Read/Write tests.
Our Cloud powered by VMware offers the following performance profiles:

• Fast disk (fast disk pool) — 19200 IOPS
• Basic disk (hybrid disk pool) — 960 IOPS

The latest Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processors provide higher vCPU performance than the previous generation.

Performance improvement across processor generation
Left scale — improved performance between generations
Right scale — integral performance growth

In summary, with our Cloud powered by VMware, you get more resources for the same cost or the same resources for less.

Integration with Selectel Services

Cloud powered by VMware users are given ample opportunities to integrate with our services and to build complex heterogeneous infrastructures:

• Local network. Our VMware virtual machines can be connected over a single network to Dedicated Servers, VPC virtual machines, and even your own equipment in colocation in Selectel data centers.
• Dedicated channel. Integrate the Cloud powered by VMware with your corporate network using a dedicated channel, providing more reliability and faster speeds than a VPN.
• Anti DDoS. Experience has show us how hackers take down services using fake requests. Anti DDoS helps prevent downtime and maintains service stability. All security parameters are based on your specific project.
• Backups. To ensure the continuous operation of virtual machines and data availability, we offer a Backup Service for Cloud powered by VMware, a virtual machine backup service built on Veeam Backup and Replication.

Full FNS Functionality

The Cloud powered by VMware offers full VMware NSX functionality.

Network microsegmentation and security monitoring in virtual data centers:

• Distributed Firewall lets you configure filtration rules on the application level, which lets you abstract from the network architecture, reducing labor costs and errors.
• VPN and firewalls on the edge router provide protected channels to different points of presence and let you flexibly configure filtration rules at the network threshold of the virtual data center.

TCO is reduced by avoiding third-party solutions; all functions are already present on the NSX platform:

• Firewall — firewall with status monitoring and support of all protocols
• NAT — separate address translation rules based on source and assigned IP as well as port translating
• DHCP — configuration of IP pools, gateways, DNS servers, and search domains
• IPsec VPN — create VPN connections between platforms under the IPsec standard
• Load Balancing — application layer load balancer (L4/L7) with dynamic virtual IP and server group settings
• Dynamic Routing — BGP and OSPF support for configuring complex networks and network interaction between multiple locations

More than just VMware

The service can be ordered from the control panel in just a few clicks, and creating a vDC takes less than a minute. As soon as a vDC is created, you can open the vDirector panel from the Selectel control panel and start managing your virtual data center.

From the control panel, you can access a dashboard, where cloud resource metering and billing is visually presented. With pay-as-you-go billing and no minimum quotas, all cloud functions are available as soon as the first vDC is created.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is one where client and provider computing resources are used simultaneously. This should first and foremost be attractive to people who are just getting ready to start moving to the cloud, either by migrating part of or a full application to the Cloud or starting new projects directly in the Cloud.

The hybrid cloud is built on vCloud Extender. If you already have a VMware-based cloud, you can combine it with ours and easily migrate your virtual machines to Selectel.

Hybrid Cloud powered by VMware architecture

Disaster-Proof Solution

By default, all client machines work in the same data center as the vSAN storage system. If one virtualization host fails, the system will be redeployed on another host. This basic level of fault tolerance is called, in VMware terms, High Availability.
Disaster Recovery is the next level of fault tolerance, where the virtual machine cluster and shared storage is backed up in another data center using VMware Stretched vSAN technology. In the event of a failure in the main data center, all VMs will be redeployed on hosts in the backup data center. The Selectel VMware Cloud disaster-proof cluster is hosted in Dubrovka 3 and Tsvetochnaya 2 and connected by three routes of our own fiber-optic line.

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Cloud Use Cases

• Expanding the capabilities of your own data center to the cloud — Combine your private VMware infrastructure with our block for increased power without investing in infrastructure.
• Exporting public applications to the cloud — Move your high-load services to a flexible and scalable cloud with pay-as-you-go billing and familiar tools.
• Cloud as a backup data center — Improve fault tolerance of critical and business applications by creating a backup data center in the Selectel Cloud powered by VMware at next to no cost.
• Quickly launch testing environments in the cloud — Deploy test environments and new projects in minutes on the VMware platform.

Pricing and Payment

The service implements a pay-as-you-go billing system. All VM components are included: vCPU, RAM, disk space (for halted virtual machines, only disk space is calculated). The results are multiplied by the hourly resource soss and are debited from the user’s balance.

Sample resource prices per month (approximately 730 hours per month):

Future Developments

We will continue to work on our server and have major updates planned for later this year.

• Q3 2018
  Launch private and hybrid cloud solutions
• Q4 2018
  Open a location in Moscow.
  Launch 4-processor hosts for hosting heavy enterprise applications and databases.

Conclusion

Our new service is already available and can be tried for free in the Selectel Lab or ordered directly in the control panel. We look forward to hearing your feedback and comments for future developments.

If you have any questions, please share them with us below.