managedhosting.de GmbH is a German Cloud Service Provider that provides innovative services around managed hosting, e-commerce and IT outsourcing for businesses, banks, publishing companies and SaaS providers. managedhosting.de prides itself with having the utmost flexibility and speed when it comes to helping customers solve their business needs, aligned with their guiding principle: We deliver high-quality services that exceed our customers' expectations: fast, implementation-oriented, inexpensive, and with real added value.
For years managedhosting.de is running a stable vCloud Director platform to support services such as IaaS, DRaaS, or SaaS. This platform needed to be extended to support the latest technology stack and offer self-services for tenants, visibility into performance data, integrated billing, Kubernetes services, modern API and HTML5 capabilities of the cloud platform.
The (Co-) CEO Andreas Wolske stated, that “the success of our company is based primarily on the work and personal commitment of each individual employee” and continued: “to be able to best judge the challenges with the project and decide the best way forward, we decided to conduct a workshop with every stakeholder in our company and an external help from the cloud experts at comdivision”.
Fabian Lenz was invited to attend the strategy workshop. “We found that it would be best to start with a greenfield approach and a step-by-step migration of the workloads” explained Lenz, “I suggested to use the VMware Cloud Provider Pod to deploy a VMware based, greenfield cloud that adheres to VMware Validated Design principles”.
A Cloud Provider Pod-deployed stack is thoroughly tested for interoperability and performance. It is also tested for cloud-scale and is built to handle rigorous Cloud Provider workloads. It deploys technologies with core provider capabilities such as data center extension, cloud migration, and multi-tenancy and chargeback, and helps achieve the fastest path to VMware-based cloud services delivery. The system includes VMware vCloud Director, VMware NSX, VMware vSphere, VMware vRealize Log Insight, VMware Operations & Tenant App and VMware vCloud Availability to offer DRaaS.
“Obviously it helped, that the comdivision team (including myself) was deeply involved with the development of Cloud Provider Pod” said Lenz, “I certainly know first-hand that the system is indeed capable of rolling out a whole platform within hours, however, Cloud Provider Pod does provide a fully autonomous system with all networking and fire-walling in place, but to integrate the system into an existing environment requires thorough planning. The deployment is based on a very standardized set of parameters. Since managedhosting.de required certain changes within the network characteristics, we could fully play out the customizability of the Cloud Provider Pod. We performed a proof of concept (PoC) in comdivision’s own lab environment and showed the team at managedhosting.de how smoothly the deployment of the Cloud Provider Pod works.”
After the deployment managedhosting.de has been able to properly test, evaluate and extend the cloud platform to their needs.
New tenants are onboarded to the new platform while existing tenants have enough time to migrate their workload to the Cloud Provider Pod based platform.
“The planning and deployment of the complete Cloud Provider Pod platform from 0-100% was less than 5 days!” exclaimed the Wolske, “Fabian did a great job explaining the process to our team and how we should prepare the onboarding process of migrating existing workloads of our customers. We are planning to involve comdivision’s and Fabian’s help to streamline this process.”
