The following terms, acronyms, and abbreviations are used throughout this document.

Cloud Service Provider (CSP): A business entity that offers computing, storage, or software services powered by VMware cloud platforms to consumers through a private or public network.

Tenant (or client): A business entity using the services offered by the CSP and accepting some sort of service level agreement.

Consumer (or customer or end user): Someone who consumes the services offered by the tenant or directly by the CSP. Also accepts the service level agreement with the CSP through the tenant or has one of his own with the tenant.

Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC): A data center facility where the elements of the infrastructure are virtualized and delivered as a service and where the provisioning and operation is abstracted from the hardware and fully implemented through software.

Total Cost of Ownership (TOC): An estimate of the expenses associated with a product or with a particular equipment during the spanning of its entire lifecycle (purchase, deployment, management, usage, and retirement).

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL): A set of practices focused to align IT services and business by describing processes and their relationships with people and technologies.

Service: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

Service Level Agreement (SLA): An agreement between a service provider and a customer. The SLA describes what service is to be provided, details how it is provided, and documents the responsibilities of the parties involved (service provider and customer).

Operation Level Agreement (OLA): An agreement among internal groups of the service provider, or between the service provider and its partners, that defines the relationships and responsibilities to support the level of service agreed upon.

Cloud Management Platform (CMP): A suite of integrated products that provide management for public, hybrid, and private cloud environments (includes self-service interfaces, provisioning systems, metering and billing, and workload optimization).

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI): A type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture tightly integrating compute, storage, networking, and virtualization resources and leveraging commodity hardware to support it.

vSAN: A software-defined enterprise-class shared storage solution embedded in the hypervisors.

VMware vCloud Suite®: An integrated suite of VMware technologies that offers cloud management capabilities.

VMware vRealize® Suite: A complement and extension of the vCloud Suite targeting the most complex cloud-based solution with hybrid environments and mixed hypervisors.

Open Virtualization Archive (OVA): An archive file containing a compressed and installable version of a virtual machine.

Wide Area Network (WAN): A telecommunications network that interconnects locations extended over a large geographical distance.

Metropolitan Area Network (MAN): A network that interconnects computer resources in a limited geographic area or region, usually identified by a city.

Round-Trip Time (RTT): The length of time it takes for a signal pulse or packet to travel from a specific source to a specific destination and back again.