As companies make plans to move workloads to the cloud, the virtualization factor seemed to be the last hurdle. Thanks to IBM and VMware’s strategic partnership, that hurdle now belongs to the past.

Here’s the thing: until recently, moving a completely virtualized server farm from an on-premise data center to the cloud could turn out a little more complex than expected. Hypervisor compatibility issues often resulted in extra costs. IBM and VMware  partnership puts these issues to rest. The partnership enables enterprise customers to easily and securely extend their existing workloads, as they are, from their on-premises software-defined data center to the cloud. 

Customers are able to leverage VMware’s proven technologies with IBM’s growing footprint of 45 cloud data centers worldwide to help companies scale globally while avoiding retooling expenses, development risks and security concerns. This way, the combination of IBM and VMware helps enterprises take better advantage of the cloud’s speed and economics.

Moving workloads around the hybrid cloud
IBM and VMware have jointly designed an architecture and cloud offering that enables customers to automatically provision pre-configured VMware SDDC environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud. This new set-up allows organizations to deploy workloads in this hybrid cloud environment without modification, due to common security and networking models based on VMware.

IBM uses the CloudBuilder tools and its workload automation capabilities to automatically provision pre-configured or custom workloads to the cloud, validated by VMware’s design patterns for Software Defined Data Center architectures. It allows IBM customers to use existing tools to dynamically move and manage workloads between the on-site data center and the cloud. In addition, VMware has extended vRealize Automation and vCenter management tools to deploy and manage environments on IBM Cloud, as if they are part of a customer’s local data center. Furthermore, IBM and VMware are preparing new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments, including seamless workload migration, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.