The sample conceptual and logical design configurations outlined in the following sections are based on use cases from a UK-based VMware Cloud Provider that has data centers across Europe. This service provider wants to provide virtual data centers across a shared multitenant platform and also provide dedicated private cloud service offerings to their consumers based on the next-generation VMware platform.

The service provider has an extensive hosting portfolio, which has assisted the growth of the company over a number of years. Currently there are many different platforms and this separation of products is leading to manual workflows and limitations in the automation and self-service capabilities they currently offer to their consumers. For this reason, there is a requirement to consolidate these offerings under a single physical infrastructure and consumer portal, and provide a new level of automation and self-service to the new generation of platforms. The primary aim of this modernization of existing platforms is to reduce the support overhead and to free operational resource time and work effort to focus on higher value customers. The increase of agility within the self-service and API driven portals enables the business to engage customers higher up the stack, while offering greater automation in terms of scaling, and adding, removing, or changing services.

The following sections address two different use cases within the hosting portfolio: