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
- 2 NICs → Compute Network Fabric
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!
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