A service level agreement (SLA) is a negotiated or standard contract between a VMware public cloud service provider and the consumer that documents the services, service-level guarantees, responsibilities, and limits between the two parties.

General guidelines for VMware public cloud service providers require that any service offering made available carry a comprehensive SLA guarantee that is equal to or exceeds three 9s (99.9%) for availability and reliability, and includes special considerations for overall service performance and customer support handling and responsiveness. An SLA defines responsibilities and limitations associated with the services, including:

Detailed guidance on how to calculate the level of availability and performance for all VMware Powered Public Cloud service elements is beyond the scope of this document. However, it is anticipated that service providers have an SLA framework in place that can be leveraged or augmented to support cloud services. SLA guarantees must extend to all facets of a provider’s cloud hosting infrastructure and individual service domains (for example, compute, network, storage, Layer 4–7 services, and management/control plane) that directly support VMware Powered Public Cloud services. Adherence to SLA requirements must also factor in the resiliency of the management framework, which provides API and user interface accessibility for service subscribers.