Managing your Flexible Cloud environment via VMware Cloud Director

What Flexible Cloud is built on

Flexible Cloud is Worldstream's VMware-based cloud platform, built to VMware Cloud Foundation standards. That foundation is made up of three VMware components working together:

• VMware vSphere handles virtualisation, running your virtual machines on Worldstream's underlying hardware.
• NSX-T provides the networking layer: virtual networking, segmentation and security policy, independent of the physical network underneath.
• vSAN, on all-flash NVMe storage, provides the storage layer, pooling flash storage across hosts into shared datastores for your VMs.

It's the same VMware stack large enterprises run in their own data centres, delivered here as infrastructure you consume rather than operate yourself.

Managing it: VMware Cloud Director

You manage your Flexible Cloud environment through the VMware Cloud Director portal. Cloud Director is VMware's self-service management layer for VMware-based clouds: it gives you a web interface to create and control virtual machines, virtual networks and other resources inside your own organisation's slice of the platform, without needing access to the underlying vSphere infrastructure directly.

What that gets you: vMotion, DRS and HA

Because Flexible Cloud runs on full VMware Cloud Foundation rather than a stripped-down virtualisation layer, you get three enterprise VMware capabilities as standard:

• vMotion, live migration of a running virtual machine from one physical host to another with no downtime. VMware's vMotion, DRS, and HA capabilities, part of the underlying VMware Cloud Foundation stack, are designed to move workloads for maintenance or load reasons with minimal interruption; Worldstream's specific operational practice around this isn't detailed here.
• DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), automated balancing of workloads across the available hosts, so resource-hungry VMs don't end up starving each other on the same physical machine.
• High Availability (HA), automatic failover: if a physical host fails, VMs that were running on it are restarted on healthy hosts automatically.

Together, these are what Worldstream points to for Flexible Cloud's performance, scalability and uptime: workloads get balanced automatically, migrated without downtime when needed, and recovered automatically if hardware fails underneath them.