Organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid & multi-cloud strategies and distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers. In the past, location-based restrictions required workloads to run within customer-owned data centers or preferred public clouds, but the increased acceptability of hybrid cloud-based infrastructures has decreased this trend. These days, workload locations are determined more by the nature of the workload and this placement choice has added to the operational complexity for the virtualization administration teams. Today’s administrators must simultaneously monitor virtualization infrastructure that is spread across customer data centers and several public clouds using multiple cloud provider consoles.

Admins utilizing multiple management consoles to manage daily operations struggle with the lack of unified infrastructure visibility, standardized management operations, and homogeneous user experience. This problem causes many operational inefficiencies such as over-provisioning of infrastructure, operational overheads toggling between consoles, and sub-optimal governance. In today’s multi-cloud workload environments, it is essential for IT teams to have a management platform that provides unified infrastructure visibility and standardized operations across clouds.

Efficiently manage virtual infrastructures

Intersight Virtualization Service simplifies the cloud experience by providing visibility of virtualization infrastructure and normalizing operations across multiple private and public clouds. The Intersight Virtualization Service dashboard shows all virtual machine inventory and supporting virtualization infrastructure across these clouds. For enterprises, this means faster, more efficient provisioning and simplified management of daily operations.

Intersight Virtualization Service empowers hybrid cloud admins by eliminating operational inefficiencies in daily operations with the following features:

• A dashboard with a unified view of all the virtualization infrastructure across multiple clouds
• High-level customizable widgets that direct user attention to important aspects of your infrastructure
• Normalized management operations across multiple clouds
• Secure connections to the private and public clouds to maintain consistent visibility into your virtualization inventory

Intersight Virtualization Service currently integrates with VMware vCenter and AWS console and complements these cloud provider consoles. It supports unified power operations for virtual machines running across AWS and VMware. With this flexibility, hybrid cloud administrators can increase their efficiency by using a centralized IVS dashboard to manage virtualization workloads rather than toggling between multiple cloud provider consoles.

The power of the Intersight cloud operations platform

Many cloud management products promise to address the challenges of multi-cloud management but fall short in areas of security and features. When you choose to manage hybrid cloud infrastructure using Intersight Virtualization Service, you invest in a platform that offers more than just multi-cloud inventory and operations capability.

The Intersight cloud operations platform provides full-stack visibility, container management, automation and orchestration, and more through several other cloud services within the platform such as:

• Intersight Infrastructure Service – provides infrastructure management for monitoring, provisioning, troubleshooting, and proactive maintenance of Cisco UCS and Hyperflex. This includes automated RMAs, full-stack curated upgrades, and automation for deployment and day 2 operations.
• Intersight Cloud Orchestrator – an easy-to-use, low-code orchestrator that allows users to provision and orchestrate infrastructure and workloads across private and public cloud, without coding skills.
• Intersight Workload Optimizer A real-time decision engine that ensures the health of applications while optimizing workload placements to lower costs across your hybrid cloud environment.
• Intersight Kubernetes Service (IKS)  built upon 100% upstream Kubernetes, IKS simplifies deployment and day 2 operations of Kubernetes on-premises and in public- cloud.  It also adds curated features, add-ons, and extensions to ensure container infrastructure is secure, consistent, and in compliance.
  • Cisco Service Mesh Manager – Simplified deployment and continued lifecycle management of an Istio Service Mesh.  Features include canary upgrades, service level objective alerting, mTLS policy management, time-based health metrics analytics.
  • Intersight Workload Engine – adds enterprise virtualization at no additional licensing cost to the Intersight Kubernetes Service advantage tier. For customers, this means an automated deployment of Kubernetes virtualized clusters including networking, storage, compute, virtualization, and operating systems
• Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform – Brings Infrastructure as Code to your on-premises environment simply and securely with HashiCorp Terraform Cloud integration with Intersight

Looking ahead with innovation

With this release, the framework for cross-cloud inventory and operations is now available for VMware and AWS. Intersight Virtualization Service will continuously innovate with exciting new capabilities to improve the way hybrid cloud is managed. For more information on Intersight Virtualization Service, please visit the  Intersight website.

Resources

• Intersight Virtualization Service comes with an  Intersight Advantage license
• Get a free personalized one-on-one demo and learn to manage your virtualization inventory across multiple clouds in a unified way and find out for yourself why we’re so excited about it!