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Colt® Edge Private Cloud support: Overview

Colt Edge Private Cloud—based on VMware Cloud Foundation™ and Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) technology—is designed to help reduce human errors, improve security and enable new levels of control and scalability between multiple clouds and the edge. Fully managed, pre-built infrastructure for high-performance private computing connected to our global fiber network.

Managing Edge Private Cloud

Use the Colt Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation portal to manage your Edge Private Cloud service:

Edge Private Cloud support

  • Support by phone (response objective is 1–5 minutes): +44 800 496 5000 (+800 5336 3273)
     

  • Support by email (response objective is <6 hours): incident@colt.net

  • Support by ticket (response objective is <1 hour). If you do not have a Managed Services portal account, contact a member in your organization with an administrator account and request an account. You will need to provide a site name contact. If you don't know a site name contact for your organization, contact your Colt account team. To submit a ticket in the Managed Services portal:

    1. Sign in to the Managed Services portal.

    2. Search for and select your company or site ID.

    3. Type your main contact.

    4. In the What Product is this for? field, select Cloud.

    5. In the Which Cloud Product list, select Colt Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation.

    6. In the What is the status? list, select Experiencing an Issue, Requesting a Change, or Requesting Information.

    7. Based on the option you select, additional fields will appear in the form.

    8. Fill in the fields. When you're done, click Submit.

Colt maintains and monitors all software and hardware components of the Colt Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation™ stack. If an error occurs in any of the components, monitors catch it and send an alert to the Colt Service Desk. The Colt Service Desk proritizes incoming errors by type and severity and handles them accordingly. Colt monitors the following components:

Hardware

  • System board
  • RAM
  • Power supplies
  • Battery
  • Fan
  • CPU
  • Controllers
  • Storage
  • Network interfaces

Software

  • ESXi servers
  • vSphere
  • Datastore
  • Licenses
  • Network uplinks
  • Database
  • Backups

Use VMware Cloud Foundation API endpoints to manage your Edge Private Cloud service. To use the API endpoints, you must create an authorization token that you then copy and paste into the API session creation endpoint. After creating an API session, use VMware API endpoints to manage your Edge Private Cloud service.

To learn more, refer to the following:

Acronyms

Term Definition
DCC Dedicated cloud compute.
NAT Network address translation.
SDDC Software‑defined data center. Facility housing hardware used for infrastructure virtualization and service deployment.
SDN Software‑defined networking. Network method used to control traffic and network resources depending on the needs and priority of applications, software, or machines.
vApp Virtual application. A vApp consists of one or more virtual machines.
VDC Virtual data center. Environments where virtual systems can be stored, deployed, and operated. An organization can have multiple VDCs.
VDC networks Network contained within a VCD (VMware Cloud Director) VDC (virtual data center). These networks connect virtual applications to other networks within an organization as well as external networks.
vLAN Virtual local area network. Network that operates like a local area network for physically separate machines. 
VSAN Virtual storage area network. Storage shared among virtual machines and servers on a network. VSANs require a minimum of three nodes. Edge Private Cloud adds a fourth node to offer the two‑node high availability cluster for the VSAN. VSANs cannot have more than 64 nodes per cluster, but you can have multiple interconnected clusters within one virtual data center.

General Terms

Terms Definition
Catalog A catalog is a container for vApps, vApp templates, and media files in an organization. Organization administrators and catalog authors can create catalogs and add items from public catalogs to their organization catalog. Catalog contents can be shared internally with all organizations in the vCloud Director installation. Members of an organization with access to a catalog can use the stored vApp templates and media files to create their own vApps.
Client‑to‑site VPN A VPN (virtual private network) connection between a device and a remote network such as a corporate network or cloud network. The connection, or gateway, may require identity authentication from the device.
Hyperconvergence Software‑focused architecture with tightly integrated computing, storage, networking, virtual resources, and other technologies in a single system.
Double NAT Situation when a modem or gateway has more than one router connected. In this case, the NAT process is performed for each additional router. This may cause a small delay in traffic. This is also known as Multiple NAT.
Organization An organization is a collection of users, groups, and tech resources.
Site‑to‑site VPN A secure VPN (virtual private network) connection of several fixed locations over a public network such as the internet. With these connections, resources are remotely available to users in different locations.
SSL offloading The process of removing SSL‑based (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption from incoming traffic. This reduces processing demands on traffic sent using SSL.
Users and groups Users can be created locally by the organization administrator or imported from a directory service such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Groups can only be imported from the directory service. Permissions within an organization are controlled through the assignment of rights and roles to users and groups. An organization can have any number of users and groups.
vApp networks Network within a vApp connecting virtual machines. vApp networks cannot connect to other vApp networks in a VDC network or outside of the organization.
vApp templates Virtual machine image that includes an operating system, applications, and data.

VMware terms

Term Definition
Cloud Foundation architecture VMware Cloud Foundation™ is VMware’s unified Software‑Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform for private and public clouds. Cloud Foundation unifies VMware vSphere® (compute), vSAN™ (storage), and NSX® (network) virtualization into one stack through automation and lifecycle management capabilities of the VMware SDDC Manager™.
NSX A virtual networking and security software product family created from VMware's vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) and Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) intellectual property.
vCloud Director (vCD) VMware's cloud computing management tool. This tool manages Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture by monitoring and controlling various cloud‑computing components including security, virtual machine provisioning, billing, and self‑service access.
vCloud Director Extender Hybrid cloud solution that enables cloud providers and tenants to expand multi‑tier applications and perform workload migrations between on‑premise data centers and the cloud.
Virtual machine template Template used to create virtual machines. Generally, templates include an installed operating system and a set of applications.