VMware is excited to announce the General Availability of VMware Cloud Provider Hub 2.0 – a centralized portal for partners to transact, deploy and manage VMware XaaS offerings, thereby enabling the partners to offer multi-cloud managed services.
Multi-cloud challenges for Enterprises
The multi-cloud world has opened tremendous opportunities and choices for enterprises to deploy their workloads. Enterprises can now choose from edge to on-prem data centers to public clouds to best fit their workload and budget needs.
Multi-cloud also brings a whole set of challenges for enterprises. It is getting increasingly difficult for enterprises to keep pace with the growing multi-cloud deployment options. These multi-cloud deployments come with their own tools to monitor and manage the deployments, and enterprises are ending up with siloed operations and increased investments in service integration and management for their multi-cloud deployments, slowing down their digital transformation journey.
VMware Partners in the multi-cloud world
Multi-cloud challenges open a brave new world where cloud providers, system integrators and solution providers play a critical role. These partners offer the skills, scale of operations and managed services to help enterprises accelerate and simplify their multi-cloud journey. To cater to the challenges and therefore the opportunities in the multi-cloud market, these partners are in different stages of evolution to offer managed services on multi-cloud and manage the customer life cycle. While partners have expanded their portfolio of multi-cloud managed services, many are still operating these multi-cloud deployments and managed services in silos with custom tooling.
Introducing VMware Cloud Provider Hub
VMware is introducing the VMware Cloud Provider Hub, a centralized portal to enable the partners to transact, deploy and manage VMware XaaS offerings. The portal helps partners expand their managed services portfolio with asset-light VMware cloud deployments, and offer multi-cloud managed services across their customer-prem, provider-prem, and public cloud deployments.
With Cloud Provider Hub, partners can manage end-to-end customer lifecycle management including onboarding customers, provisioning and managing services for them, having a consolidated view of their usage, and managing support.
Cloud Provider Hub normalizes the way partners leverage VMware Cloud Services and offer them to their customers. Hub exposes a common means to consume, provision and manage customer access to these services, in order for the partners to offer unmanaged, partially managed or fully managed services to their customers.
Cloud Provider Hub offers a Provider console, available via graphical User Interface (UI) and API, for the partner to onboard and manage customers, manage service provisioning and access for customers, and perform usage and support management. Hub offers a Tenant console, which again is available via UI and API, for the partner’s customers to consume services provisioned by the partner.
VMware Cloud on AWS on VMware Cloud Provider Hub
With the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS on Cloud Provider Hub, partners can leverage an asset-light VMware deployment to complement their on-prem deployment. Partners can seamlessly extend their on-prem VMware deployment with VMware Cloud on AWS for hybrid deployments, application migration, elastic scalability needs, and geographic expansion, as well as connect from VMware Cloud on AWS into native AWS for application modernization. Partners can continue to extend the managed services that they offer on their on-prem into VMware Cloud on AWS to meet the expanded market opportunity.
VMware already has partners successfully leveraging the earlier version of Cloud Provider Hub, called the Managed Service Provider (MSP) platform, to help customers migrate from on-prem VMware deployments into VMware Cloud on AWS, offering managed services around architecture, migration, monitoring, backup, security and disaster recovery, as well as multi-cloud applications on VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS.
VMware Cloud Services on VMware Cloud Provider Hub
The availability of VMware Cloud Services on Cloud Provider Hub ensures that partners do not need to invest in and operate siloed managed services for multiple clouds, be it edge, on-prem or public cloud. VMware Cloud Services are being designed to be multi-cloud capable with a long-term goal of helping partners offer centralized managed services across edge, vSphere, vCloud Director, VMware Cloud on AWS, and AWS—with the intent of also delivering a framework that could also extend to other public cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
The VMware Cloud Service available with the launch of Cloud Provider Hub is VMware Log Intelligence. With Log Intelligence on Hub, partners can do centralized log collection for multiple customers across multiple clouds, for centralized log analysis, monitoring of alerts, troubleshooting and incident response. The partners can push customer-specific logs and dashboards to the tenant console of Cloud Provider Hub.
In my conversation with a partner, who has traditionally been a Solution Provider, but started to offer more managed services on multi-cloud, the partner found the centralized monitoring and incident response via VMware Log Intelligence on Hub very appealing. The partner manages multiple customers with different clouds, and with centralized log collection, the support teams in the partner’s organization would be able to quickly troubleshoot customer problems. The partner also can push periodic dashboards for the customers to view in Log Intelligence via the tenant console of Hub. This way the partner needn’t spend valuable hours preparing reports and sharing them with their customers over emails, and the customers get better experience by having a self-service view of their log analysis dashboards.
The path forward
We are working hard to deliver more VMware Cloud Services, as well as VMware Cloud Marketplace, which includes third-party applications validated on VMware deployments, on Cloud Provider Hub in future making Hub the central portal for partners to offer managed services on multi-cloud in a consistent way.
Discover how the new VMware Managed Service Provider platform enables cloud service providers to operate and manage services across multiple tenants. Get the webinar here.
For more information on VMware Cloud Provider Hub, visit https://cloud.vmware.com/cloud-provider-hub/ and read this blog, where Subha Shankar discusses the new capabilities introduced in Cloud Provider Hub 2.0 in great depth.
