Despite the popularity of Public Cloud services, many companies like to have their own private cloud, and either consume a managed Private Cloud service, like Leaseweb’s VMware HCI service, or choose to build their own cost-effective virtualized server cluster to act as their Private Cloud, fully self-managed.
How could that work? With your own choice of virtualization software, you can virtualize a cluster of servers to run your virtual machines on dedicated hardware. Your own Private Cloud.
At Leaseweb, we have many customers doing exactly this. This blog is to provide some inspiration on how this can be setup using standard Leaseweb services.
The basic idea is that the underlying hypervisors are powered by dedicated compute power delivered by Leaseweb Dedicated Servers. These servers are ideally deployed in different racks for cluster reliability, which benefits the overall availability of the private cloud.
The dedicated servers are interconnected with Leaseweb Private Network, enabling your own private Layer 2 VLAN between your hypervisors. You can assign any internal IP address(es) to your (hypervisors and) Virtual Machines on your private network VLAN. The private network stretches across the data center (and across the other data center in the same metro area, where applicable). This enables the spreading of dedicated servers across multiple data center halls (and multiple data centers, where applicable).
Leaseweb Cloud Storage (including File Storage, i.e. storage volumes accessed using NFS or SMB/CIFS) is added to the Leaseweb Private Network as well, which enables you to add a NAS for file storage to your cluster of servers, or your private cloud.
For ready-to-use (virtual) compute resources, linked to your Private Network as well, consider to add ready-to-use Leaseweb services like Public Cloud compute instances, on demand.
As a gateway between your private network and the public internet, you can run a dedicated network firewall, for example, to act as the default secure gateway for all Virtual Machines and services running on the private network.
The private network serves more purposes. It can interconnect also to Leaseweb Cloud Connect, so you can integrate your Virtual Private Cloud environment at other (public) cloud providers, such as AWS, GCP and Azure.
You can also combine your private cloud with some Leaseweb public cloud services, like Leaseweb Managed Kubernetes and Leaseweb Cloud Object Storage.
The above describes hopefully in a nutshell the possibilities of running your own Private Cloud powered by reliable, flexible and cost-effective Leaseweb services. Do you want to know more? Let’s get in contact via one of my Sales colleagues.