Knowing the Best Practices, FAQs, and Common Pitfalls

Incorporating a new service into the enterprise infrastructure landscape is not easy. A lot of factors must be considered to make the project a success. In this chapter, you will learn how to make the adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS as smooth as possible.

The following are the topics to be covered in this chapter:

• Best practices
• Avoiding common pitfalls
• FAQs

Best practices

When you are designing, implementing, and operating a service, it’s vital to follow common best practices to prevent performance, availability, and security issues. In this section, we will summarize the most common best practices for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Design and architecture

A solid design is the basis for successful implementation and a positive user experience. Never start deploying the service before completing the design phase. Once production workloads are running on the SDDC, it will be very hard to redesign the implementation without affecting the user experience. Most production outages occur in infrastructures that are deployed without a proper architecture design.

The standard industry flow for the design and architecture phase is as follows:

• Discovery workshops with key business and technical stakeholders
• Key design decisions
• Logical and physical design
• Implementation

Let’s see more details about each of...

Avoiding common pitfalls

In the previous section, we were focused on how to do things right. However, it’s also important to highlight the most common scenarios, configurations, and design decisions where a resulting configuration proved to be ineffective and error-prone.

Compute

Compute resources provide the necessary CPU and memory resources for virtual machines. Let’s review the most common misconfigurations and/or suboptimal design choices:

• Sizing

  It’s often the case that VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs are either undersized or oversized. Undersized environments lead to low performance and a bad user experience, while oversized environments are expensive in terms of cost per VM. Opting for a right-sizing exercise and expanding on-premises vSphere environments as an afterthought may result in running into extended procurement cycles. However VMware Cloud on AWS benefits from the flexible and elastic capacity of public clouds. Paired with the right Elastic...

FAQ

In this section, we will cover the most common questions we get from organizations that are interested in VMware Cloud on AWS. You can also find the comprehensive FAQs list published on the VMware Tech Zone website (https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/vmware-cloud-aws-frequently-asked-questions).

How is VMware Cloud on AWS different from “just” a vSphere deployment?

VMware Cloud on AWS includes not only vSphere, but also vSAN and NSX, providing an all-in-one solution for organizations’ needs. VMware Cloud on AWS is offered as a service, in contrast to an on-premises vSphere deployment, removing the burden of lifecycle management from IT teams.

How does VMware Cloud on AWS fit into the “public cloud first” strategy?

VMware Cloud on AWS provides enterprises with a quick, secure, and scalable option to mass migrate thousands of applications to the public cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS offers a lot of native public cloud benefits, including elastic...

Summary

In this chapter, we focused on defining best practices when planning, designing, and operating a cloud environment based on VMware Cloud on AWS. As well as best practices, it’s also important to learn about and understand examples of suboptimal design choices and their potential influence on the infrastructure. Reviewing the most common questions and answers will help you summarize the most important points about VMware Cloud on AWS.

In the next chapter, we will review some configuration examples.