Moving a customer from a traditional MSP environment to the service provider’s cloud platform does not change the basic requirements on which the service was originally built. The attributes listed in Section 2.2.1, Traditional Managed Service Customer Topology still apply. Translating the topology to a vCloud Director managed service results in a very similar topology which is shown in the following figure.

 

With the introduction of NSX, the roles of the physical tenant core router and internal firewall are replaced by the Edge Services Gateway. Because this device provides North/South firewall capabilities, it can also remove the need for a dedicated WAN firewall, saving the service provider cost and complexity so contributing to both CapEx and OpEx reductions. While the topology seems almost identical to that shown earlier, what is not visible in the figure is the customer’s ability to deploy compute and network services from the Edge Services Gateway southbound through the vCloud Director portal. This addresses the two shortfalls identified with MSP services, the customer’s ability to make changes to their own environments and the speed and reliability with which those changes can be implemented.