How to Choose a Cloud Provider for Your VMware Workloads

Choosing to migrate from an on-premises or cloud-native environment to VMware-on-Cloud is an important decision to make.

You want to take advantage of cloud services, flexibility and savings; but once you’ve decided to take this step, what comes next?

Understanding your existing environment and your future business goals is key to successful cloud adoption. Assessing your current specific environment and modeling it will help you partner with the best cloud provider that meets your needs and lays out a successful cloud adoption strategy.

Five key factors to consider

An important aspect of your cloud adoption journey is to decide where to host your VMware-on-Cloud workload. The cloud provider needs to meet your requirements while significantly lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO).

Here are some critical factors to consider:

1. Level of control: Enterprises seek privacy, compliance and security in the cloud. The level of control of the cloud environment determines whether you can manage your data privacy, security, and compliance the way you require. Do you want unrestricted flexibility of the VMware environment to save CapEx while utilizing operations strength you already have?
2. Regional availability: Another key factor in choosing a cloud provider is knowing your scalability and growth plans. Do you need a global scalable presence or are you looking for local regional concentration.?
3. Maximum cluster size: The right cluster size helps you manage the uptime, higher availability and serviceability. This factor directly relates to the number of workloads, workload size and their chattiness. Do you have large workloads? Do you have large groups of interworking workloads? Knowing your workloads will define the cluster size that is right for you. This will help you decide which cloud provides you the right-sized cluster.
4. Network traffic: Network bandwidth requirement is directly proportional to the expected network traffic in a hybrid cloud environment. The network bandwidth determines the costs associated with data transport. Who is bearing these costs? How much recurring network cost does it add to your TCO? This is an important factor in selecting a cloud provider.
5. Flexibility of host models: The number of hosts required decides the recurring costs you will incur in a cloud environment. It becomes important to know if the cloud provider gives you the flexibility of host sizes, variety of models and granularity of host availability. This will directly impact your recurring costs and reduce your TCO.

Comparison across leading cloud platforms

There are multiple cloud providers to choose from — each with an array of VMware-on-Cloud configurations. Each cloud provider offers different features and benefits to stand out from the competition.

Understanding these features and how they relate to the intricacies of your workload is key for choosing the most cost-effective cloud platform. You can get a quick comparative view of VMware-on-Cloud of all leading cloud platforms and arrive at the best fit for your organization.

Modeling and right-sizing your cloud environment

A thorough pre-migration cloud modeling is necessary to visualize cost savings in the cloud, such as from right-sizing your cloud environment. This can save you 30-60% in cloud costs that would otherwise be wasted on over-provisioned VMs. Modeling your on-premises and future cloud environment by hand is time-consuming, painstaking and, in some cases, impossible.

A good modeling SaaS solution provides an inventory of your on-premises infrastructure and allows you to perform scenario analysis to determine what is the most cost-effective cloud platform to migrate to. It also allows you to find hidden costs quickly and easily for each cloud platform you are considering.

Akasia analyzes your current workload environment and provides a CapEx and OpEx TCO analysis from the infrastructure and usage, based on workload consumption. It provides right-size recommendations across cloud providers, sized to the specific usage.

Take the no-cost VMware application migration assessment

Cloud analysis, assessment, and modeling are the most important steps for a successful cloud adoption strategy enabling seamless migration of your VMware workloads. Assessment and modeling will take the guesswork out of cloud migrations and help you plan the most cost-effective lift-and-shift workload migration.

The cloud provider is your partner for the long term. Its selection will determine a future-ready modernization strategy for your enterprise.