A cloud broker is a third-party individual or business that provides an intermediary service between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service, often with the broker providing additional cloud management services as part of, or alongside, their broker business offerings.

In this use case, the end consumer wants to employ VMware vRealize® Automation™ as a cloud service broker, allowing the customer to host workloads across a wide range of cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, VMware Cloud Providers, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack offerings from various providers.

In this use case, the cloud provisioning and management components are hosted on-premises, along with VMware vRealize Operations Manager™, for the operational monitoring of the various public cloud platforms and several internal applications that the consumer wants to keep local to their office. All locally hosted virtual machines are replicated to the VMware Cloud Provider’s data center, through VMware vSphere Replication™, to provide a redundant solution, and to provide the managed service provider with the data to perform daily backups. Add-on services, such as automated recovery through VMware Site Recovery Manager™, might also be included.

The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture for this final use case.

 

For more information about licensing, see the flexible VMware Cloud Provider Program licensing model announcement at https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/partners/vspp/vmw-vcloud-air-network-program-guide.pdf.

See also VMware Cloud Provider Program details at http://www.vmware.com/partners/service-provider.