Happy New Year!!! This is going to be an exciting year for VMware Cloud on AWS and I wanted to kick off 2018 by highlighting the way in which you are going to connect into and out of VMware Cloud on AWS.
First of all, VMware Cloud on AWS is optimized (VMware Cloud Foundation) to run on dedicated, elastic bare metal infrastructure at a very high level inside Amazon’s data centers. For security purposes, the VMware Cloud on AWS SDCC is bifurcated to the components that manage the SDDC itself such as ESXi, VSAN, NSX, and vCenter.
Here’s a simple explanation of how you can setup the connectivity framework.
The first thing you need to setup is a connection to the management components of the SDDC. You will first need to create a Management VPN and choose a set range of IP addresses that will be used by management components such as the ESXi hosts and vCenter. This range will be in the form of a simple CIDR block. We recommend using a /20 CIDR block for management purposes. After you connect the management portion of the SDDC, you will then need to setup an IPSec VPN between your on-prem data center and management components. This VPN can be setup over the Internet or AWS Direct Connect (DirectX). After this connection is established, you can then build firewall rules on the VMware Cloud on AWS Console. With these rules you can control access to the vCenter from your on-prem data center.
There is an optional connection you can setup if you need access to your vCenter Server directly from the Internet. A public IP is automatically provided during the provisioning process. It is important to note that all access to this IP is restricted. To provide access, you will need to configure firewall rules in the VMware Cloud on AWS console to allow this direct type of Internet access.
The second VPN you will need to setup is between your compute workloads and your on-premise data center. Several logical networks are required to provide the IP addresses for the workloads you plan on migrating or build in VMware Cloud on AWS. This VPN secures these workloads and allows them to connect back to your on-prem data center. This can be an IPSec VPN or L2VPN. The L2VPN advantage is that you can stretch a single L3 IP space from on-prem to the cloud and is also required for live migrations. This VPN can go over the Internet or AWS DirectX. You can again create firewall rules as needed to access on-prem workloads.
The next connection is between your SDDC workloads and your Amazon VPC. This is automatically configured and built during the SDDC provisioning process. Once you select the Amazon VPC subnet that will be associated with your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC an elastic network interface (ENI) will be created allowing traffic to flow between both environments. In order to control security, you will need to configure AWS IAM policies as well as firewall rules on the VMware Cloud on AWS side to allow access between both. Lastly, you will likely need to give direct public internet access to some of your SDDC workloads. To make these accessible to the Internet, you will need to leverage AWS elastic IPs along with NAT and firewall configurations to allow this type of access.
That’s it! Now you are ready to leverage your SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS!
Also, here’s a video that covers the content discussed above.
-SL
Street2Clouds 