Problem Statement

A leading financial institution in Southeast Asia is undergoing a large-scale infrastructure transformation to modernize its private cloud platform and improve service delivery for mission-critical banking applications.

The organization has been a long-time user of VMware technologies and currently operates a highly virtualized environment supporting thousands of virtual machines across core banking, digital channels, and internal enterprise systems.

Despite their investment in virtualization, the organization is facing several challenges:

• Slow time-to-market for new applications due to infrastructure dependencies
• Frequent operational bottlenecks between infrastructure teams
• Limited standardization across environments
• Increasing demand for automation, scalability, and resilience

To address these challenges, the organization has decided to adopt VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as their strategic platform for private cloud.

Key Constraints & Requirements

During discovery sessions, the customer outlined the following constraints:

• The physical network is managed by an outsourced provider
• The internal VMware team cannot make changes to the physical network
• All ESXi hosts must be configured using Link Aggregation (LACP)
• The storage architecture is disaggregated (external storage)
• NFS storage will be used as the primary datastore (no vSAN)

Additionally, the hardware design is as follows:

• Each ESXi host has 4 × 25 GbE NICs
  • 2 NICs → Compute Network Fabric
    • Management
    • vMotion
    • Virtual Machine traffic
  • 2 NICs → Storage Network Fabric
    • Dedicated NFS traffic

Objective

As a VMware Cloud Foundation Architect, you are tasked with designing a VCF solution that:

• Works within the network constraints (no physical control)
• Supports mandatory Link Aggregation requirements
• Integrates NFS-based disaggregated storage
• Ensures high availability, performance, and scalability
• Aligns with VCF validated design principles
• Minimizes operational complexity and supports lifecycle automation

Share your thoughts as a Solution Architect!

About The Author

Dr. Pranay Jha

Dr. Pranay Jha is a Cloud and AI Consultant with 18+ years of experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and enterprise infrastructure transformation. He specializes in VMware technologies, multi-cloud strategy, and Generative AI solutions. He holds a PhD in Computer Applications with research focused on Cloud and AI, has published multiple research papers, and has been a VMware vExpert since 2016 and a VMUG Community Leader.

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