VMware vRealize® Automation™ gives providers another option for offering a hosted single-tenant virtualized solution to customers. A hosted vRealize Automation solution allows customers to manage their own resources using custom provisioning workflows, manage virtual machines, create snapshots, and distribute specific resources into resource pools and/or catalogs as needed. With a host vRealize Automation solution, customers can benefit from the agility of a private cloud management platform, without the overhead that is required to deploy and manage the private cloud management infrastructure.

vRealize Automation can be used to provision virtual machines and/or applications onto a vSAN datastore while leveraging the storage-based policy management capabilities of vSAN. This is extremely valuable because storage policies can be configured on a per-application or per-virtual machine basis, allowing providers to assign policies based on a particular use case, such as tiered storage.

When implementing vSAN in a hosted Private Cloud model, vSAN will be managed in a way similar to how a customer would experience an on-premises implementation of VMware vSphere with vSAN. The VMware vSphere Web Client will provide the primary interface for any required maintenance and configuration of vSAN. The hosting solution can either be managed by the service provider or self-managed by the consumer.