“Your turn to try!”
Attracting thousands of participants at VMware Explore 2025 in Las Vegas, this year’s Hands-on Labs (HOL) offered professionals the opportunity to explore VMware technologies firsthand. Backed by OVHcloud, the HOL was presented with a guided, cloud-hosted environment for an internationally scalable learning experience. As the #1 European cloud provider and a global cloud leader, OVHcloud is also the exclusive infrastructure partner for VMware Explore’s on-tour events across the world.

OVHcloud imparts its deep VMware expertise to deliver the high-performance, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure that powers every HOL session. Users are able to enjoy a seamless, immersive, and always-on learning experience — at scale.

“We’re proud to be the infrastructure partner powering VMware’s legendary Hands-on Labs — opportunities where new skills are forged, where innovation begins, and where ideas become action,” said Jeffrey Gregor, General Manager, OVHcloud US.

A Partnership of Scale, Reliability, and Excellence

Partners for over 15 years, the collaboration between OVHcloud and VMware by Broadcom goes beyond event sponsorship and into a much more technical capacity. OVHcloud expertise delivers cloud infrastructure at scale, meeting the intense demands of a live, global environment, as is demonstrated at VMware Explore.

In Las Vegas and beyond, the HOL sessions and on-tour editions were run on an environment architected and monitored by OVHcloud experts, all while they supported thousands of concurrent lab users worldwide. This includes the new VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) labs — within which compute, networking, storage, and automation all run seamlessly on OVHcloud infrastructure — as they extend VMware’s global learning community.

“OVHcloud was the right infrastructure partner for powering these labs,” explained Marc Ray, Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer at OVHcloud US. “Our hardware capabilities and flexibility allowed us to automate deployments, optimize performance, and scale dynamically — all critical during a live event.”

VMware Cloud Director (VCD) at Scale

Making it all possible, the Hands-on Labs run on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) combined with VMware Cloud Director (VCD), which together orchestrate thousands of individual lab environments at once. VCD provides the control, automation, and resource management that allow each participant to launch a dedicated, fully featured lab environment in just seconds — complete with full isolation, high performance, and reliability. [Learn more about VCD.]

Building on this speedy success, OVHcloud has extended its use of VCD beyond the event by running it at scale for customers worldwide through its new Public VCF as-a-Service offering. This solution brings the same trusted architecture and operational excellence used in the Hands-on Labs to enterprises looking for flexible, high-performance VMware Cloud Foundation environments. With Public VCF as-a-Service, OVHcloud enables organizations to deploy VMware infrastructure on demand — with the same scalability, automation, and transparency that power VMware’s Hands-on Labs.

Inside the Infrastructure: Proven for Peak Performance

To support VMware Explore’s massive learning ecosystem, OVHcloud deployed a custom-engineered cloud platform designed to exceed VMware’s rigorous specifications.

HOL Configuration Overview:

• 37 dedicated servers across multiple OVHcloud datacenters
• 4.47 THz total CPU, 28.83 TB RAM, and 843.6 TB of NVMe VSAN storage (450 TB usable)
• Powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and vSphere 8
• Fully managed through VMware Cloud Director (VCD) — the same foundation as OVHcloud’s Public VCF service

This configuration not only met but surpassed the HOL’s minimum requirements, ensuring ultra-low latency, high availability, and predictable performance even under heavy load.

“Our teams fine-tuned everything — from bandwidth and QoS optimization to automated scaling,” said Mike Burbach, Senior Manager of Private Cloud Computing at OVHcloud. “It’s a great example of what OVHcloud does best: delivering large, customized environments that perform flawlessly at scale.”

Cross-Continental Engineering Excellence

From architecture design to deployment, the success of the Hands-on Labs relied on tight coordination between OVHcloud and VMware engineering teams. Weekly global touchpoints ensured unified planning across regions, timelines, and teams — all built on transparency, technical rigor, and mutual trust.

“From the first meeting, it was clear we shared the same goal: creating an exceptional experience for everyone using VMware Labs,” Burbach added. “That alignment and expertise made all the difference.”

This close collaboration made it possible to deploy and validate a high-performing environment in record time — one that thousands of participants could instantly connect to, explore, and tear down safely between sessions.

“Within seconds of lab selection, users are connected to a validated environment,” explained Doug Baer, Solution Architect, Broadcom. “That seamlessness is powered by thoughtful design and trusted partnerships behind the scenes.”

Giving a Hand to the Hands-On Labs Community

Behind the technology itself lies an equally powerful community of experts, engineers, and volunteers dedicated to empowering learners.

Kelly Smith, Technical Engagement Manager for Hands-on Labs, described OVHcloud’s contribution as essential:

“Our goal is to make the infrastructure invisible. Thanks to OVHcloud, users can focus entirely on exploring VMware products — without friction or complexity getting in the way.”

Chris Horning, Staff Technical Account Manager, echoed this view:

“Having a partner like OVHcloud that can rapidly scale to meet demand — while ensuring consistent and predictable performance — is critical to our success.”

From technical volunteers like Catherine Skilling, who emphasized collaboration and community, to product leaders like David D’Antremont, who highlighted the breadth of content and innovation — every voice points reiterates the same message: the success of HOL depends on its infrastructure, but also on the people behind it.

HOL On Tour: Bringing the Experience to You

Following the flagship event in Las Vegas, VMware Explore On Tour brings the same immersive learning experience to cities around the world. These regional events extend the impact of Hands-on Labs, enabling professionals to engage with VMware technologies, meet local experts, and participate in live demos and technical sessions — all supported by OVHcloud’s global infrastructure.

For 2025, VMware Explore On Tour stops include major cities such as London, Paris, Frankfurt, Sydney, Mumbai, and Tokyo, each hosting in-depth workshops, customer success stories, and opportunities to connect with the VMware and OVHcloud teams in person.

Wherever professionals join, the On Tour experience continues the same mission as Las Vegas: learning by doing, powered by collaboration and innovation.

From Las Vegas to the World: OVHcloud at the Heart of Global Learning

What starts at VMware Explore Las Vegas extends worldwide through the HOL On Tour program. Across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, the same cloud infrastructure — proudly powered by OVHcloud — enables professionals everywhere to experience VMware solutions firsthand. EMEA (London, Paris & Frankfurt) & APAC (Sydney, Mumbai & Tokyo)

This global reach underscores OVHcloud’s proven ability to deliver enterprise-grade VMware environments at scale, and anywhere in the world.

“Having a partner like OVHcloud ensures a seamless lab experience and helps make Explore a success, giving every attendee the performance they need for hands-on learning,” said David D’Antremont.

Conclusion: Hands Up to OVHcloud for Hands-On Labs

Providing opportunities to learn is how ideas are shaped, formed and spread. From concept to execution, the 2025 Hands-on Labs are a testament to what happens when engineering excellence meets purpose-built cloud infrastructure, and then sharing it with the wider public. Through its exclusive partnership with VMware by Broadcom, OVHcloud demonstrates its technical strength as well as its commitment to enabling innovation for thousands in the global VMware community.

The Hands-on Labs are living proof of OVHcloud’s expertise in building resilient, performant, and scalable cloud environments that make exploration possible for those ready to get hands-on.

“These labs aren’t just demos — they’re opportunities,” concluded Jeffrey Gregor. “They’re where innovation begins — and where ideas become action.”  

Let’s give a hand for the future of Hands-On labs!

Learn More

🎥 WATCH Inside the Hands-on Labs VIDEO
Experience the innovation, scale, and community behind the OVHcloud-powered VMware Explore environment.
📅 Book a 1:1 meeting with OVHcloud experts at us.ovhcloud.com/lp/vmware-lab
💡 Explore VMware Hands-on Labs at labs.hol.vmware.com

Today, we’re not going to talk about why you should protect your data. Because you know you should. In this article, we’ll discuss the different data backup options available, and the ideal software, skills and storage package for you.

In this article, we’ll discuss the different data backup options available, and the ideal software, skills and storage package for you.

Introduction

In the backup world, we can identify two major non-exclusive options for running backups:
Enterprise Backup Solutions and Specialised Backup.

Enterprise Backup Solutions are software capable of executing multiple backups from different sources to a wide choice of destinations. They usually have a very user-friendly User Interface/Command-Line Interface, powerful scheduling capabilities, a range of flexible features, and come with compliance and certifications. They provide extensive support, with large communities you can rely on in the long term.

On the other hand, some applications and/or databases have their own Specialised Backup mechanism. They’re optimised, efficient and extremely popular due to their high performance and, quite often, they don’t need additional licences. However, very often you need to rely on the application/database administrator to take care of the backups.

To summarise:

• Enterprise Backup Solutions are fairly universal, can easily support a company-wide backup strategy, are user-friendly and can meet detailed pre-requisites.
• Specialised Backups are high performance and low cost which is appealing, but they can be difficult to use within a global backup strategy and administrators require specific knowledge.

As well as the tool used to move data, we must consider that data has a source and a destination. Keeping in mind the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on 2 different media (disk and tape for example) with 1 copy off-site for disaster recovery), and the amount of sources in a modern IT system, both the choice of software solution and hardware platform used to store the backups must meet both the Global Backup Strategy and… your budget. There is also 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy, which is another option. After all, even if the technical possibilities are infinite, the budget isn’t.

Enterprise Backup Solutions

So, let’s look at the most practical choices you can make to protect your precious data, whilst not having to rob a bank or ten. And to be honest, we’re mainly going to be looking at cloud services. Not just because we’re a cloud services company, but because cloud storage makes a lot of sense. We’ll demonstrate why.

There are numerous Enterprise Backup Solutions on the market and some have been around for a while. You’ve probably used one, and you’re probably still using that same one today. Why? Because you developed expertise in it, and you built your backup strategy based on its features and recommendations. And that makes sense. Your staff’s experience and skills should never be discounted when investigating opportunities for expanding your backup strategy for new workloads or changing to a cloud service. But very often, this expertise translates very easily to new systems, thanks to the use of standard vocabulary and similar mechanisms. So changing to a new Enterprise Backup Solution shouldn’t be too frightening, as expertise is rarely lost; but usually expanded.

Today, all Enterprise Backup Software supports cloud backup. Whether it’s from the cloud or to the cloud. And it doesn’t come as a surprise, as a lot of workloads are in the cloud – and backups too.
Remember the 3-2-1 rule? The cloud is particularly good for storing your off-site copy given that there are hosting locations all over the world.

OVHcloud Enterprise Backup Solutions

At OVHcloud, our IaaS products are compatible with all major Enterprise Backup Software, and some, like Veeam and HYCU, are even certified to run on our Enterprise platforms. And we also provide the adequate licences so you don’t have to use yet another provider.

You can pair Veeam/HYCU solutions with nearly any Operating System/application and benefit from advanced integration with VMware and Nutanix hypervisors. They have certified compatibility with Network File System / Common Internet File System /Object Storage and you can even add features to improve security.

It’s slightly outside the scope of this article, but our Managed VMware platform even has a Zerto option, allowing you to add replication to the highly recommended backups.

Our Public Cloud instances can be protected using snapshots and backups. All our Bare Metal servers include an external storage of 500GB which can used for your backup. This storage can be extended by up to 10TB.

Other Enterprise Backup Solutions

If you want more control over your backup strategy, leveraging your expertise and fitting it to your specific requirements, it is possible to build your own backup infrastructure with OVHcloud.

 All the major players in the Enterprise Backup market are compatible and already used by OVHcloud’s customers. To mention but a few: Veeam, HYCU, Datamotive, Nakivo, Veritas Technologies, Scality, CommVault, Rubrik, Acronis and Cohesity.

Open-Source Backup Solutions

And of course, if you’d rather use open-source software, Bacula is a perfectly viable option, or the simple but robust rsync. After all, if you just need to keep a reasonably updated copy of your data somewhere else, the simplest tool can often do the job. There’s many open-source options…

Specialised Backup Solutions

Kubernetes workloads

In the Cloud Native / Public Cloud / PaaS environment, you have access to and compatibility with the main players too:

• Velero
• CloudCasa
• TrilioVault
• Veeam Kasten
• and many others.

Application/Database workloads

But what if you use specific application/database mechanisms?
Given that our promise is to be open, agnostic and reversible, we do not block third party software from interacting with your data. So as long as you have the expertise to install and manage them, you can use them and make the most of our large storage portfolio.

Many solutions integrate a mechanism from, for example, pre-backup and post-backup to launch backup of your databases. Of course, if you use your databases with our VMware by Broadcom and/or Nutanix offer, you can rely on Veeam Enterprise and HYCU.

As specified earlier, all major players in the Enterprise backup Software have modules for database protection: Nakivo, Veritas Technologies, Scality, CommVault, Rubrik, Acronis and Cohesity

OVHcloud PaaS Backup

Our Public Cloud instances can be protected using snapshots and backups and our Managed Kubernetes are compatible with several industry leading backup software such as Velero, Triliovault and CloudCasa.

Here is the recap’ of how our Public Cloud Managed products are protected and your options:

SaaS Backup and Solutions

When we’re talking about cloud and Specialised Backup, we can’t forget to mention the SaaS offers. As much as they’re convenient, affordable and widely available, making sure that your data is safe is not always included in the contract. It’s always worth researching this before committing, or you might discover unsuspected charges for your backup.

At OVHcloud, we have a large portfolio of partners who can help. You can find our complete partners directory here.

For Microsoft Office 365 backup, RG system provides a solution hosted on OVHcloud datacentre.

For Cybercriminality incidences, SI Vital solution maintains access to your vital, uninterrupted data and applications, as well as a secure, professional communications platform. A business continuity solution co-constructed with OVHcloud.

Different Types of Storage For Your Backup

Whether you are using an Enterprise Backup Solution or a Specialised Backup mechanism, you can store the backups on dedicated servers (Bare Metal storage), dedicated storage (NAS/HA, Enterprise File Storage), or the current global preferred choice for backup: Object Storage.

All OVHcloud storage solutions : https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/storage-solutions/

And because a picture is worth a thousand words (and that’s about how many words you’ve read so far in this article):

Object Storage & Cold Archive

Object Storage is particularly well-adapted to backup because:

• data growth is not limited by the underlying hardware
• it’s cost-effective
• it’s pseudo disconnected or fully disconnected in some cases
• it’s application/Operating System agnostic
• it’s friendly to static data
• it works with tapes.

Our Object Storage options are:

• Standard Object Storage: ideal for general backups.
• Performance Object Storage: ideal for critical and large backups as its high performance reduces backup and restore time.
• Cold Archive: ideal for meeting the legal requirement for data conservation and disconnected backup for safety.

Block Storage

Block Storage is still a very attractive option for storing backups because of its predictable performance and safety inherent to direct access to storage and RAID. It is the favoured media for on-premises infrastructure as storage arrays are widely available and distributed across datacentres. This distribution and the potential replication options provided by the storage arrays allow you to keep your data safe without causing you headaches. One caveat to mention is that Block Storage it is mostly reserved for server backup since end users don’t have easy access to centralised Block Storage.

File Storage

If you want to protect your users’ shares/export, File Storage is very convenient and access to the data is not bound to physical connections as is often the case for Block Storage. As long as you have access rights and network connection, using File Storage for backup is easy. Most File Storage also provides snapshots, and even though it can’t be considered a backup solution, it does provide a fast recovery mechanism. Advanced File Storage solutions provide replication and High Availability mechanisms.

Expert & Partner Ecosystem

And if you feel intimidated, our Professional Services, Solution Architect and partners can help you make an educated choice and a solid migration. But what if your data is already in the cloud? How is it protected and how can it be?

Well, the devil is in the detail, and very often, protecting your data is your responsibility, not your provider’s. So never ever assume that because your data is in the cloud, it’s automagically protected in the case of an incident.
What we do at OVHcloud is provide access to snapshots for some of our services. But there’s no Service-Level Agreement associated with these snapshots and they may not respect the 3-2-1 rule, hence are not backups.

• OVHcloud Professional Services
• OVHcloud Partner directory
• OVHcloud ISV directory
• OVHcloud Marketplace

Conclusion

Let’s finish by talking about the ideal global backup service approach for you, encompassing software and storage. The main differentiator is going to be: how much control do you want over your backup? Once you have an inventory of the data you need to backup, the first step is to check compatibility with existing or future Enterprise Backup Solutions. Most of the time, you’ll find several solutions that are able to support your needs and protect a vast majority of your data, even if they’re both on-premise and in the cloud. Having all your data in the same place is of course easier, but it rarely happens.

Then you need to verify which of the Software Solutions you’re considering are suitable for your backup strategy. And this is the perfect time to step back and evaluate. Have you missed anything? Does everything follow industry standards? And finally, who can help you find the best compromise between safety and cost. Ideally, we’ve answered all these questions above, so let’s have a look at what we can offer here:

Well, this view will be soon replaced by a new dashboard based on VMware Aria Operations (vROps)

This new dashboard includes more information that vScope. It still provides real time information and up to 30days of history. Very useful when you’re back from a well-deserved time off, when you want to identify patterns or just when someone tells you about a problem a week later 😊

A bit of history:

vScope started a long, long time ago (in a galaxy not so far away) and was providing nearly real-time status of your VMware hosts, datastores and VMs. Well, real time give or take 5mn….

At the time, it was convenient and simple enough to give an overview of your PCC and automatic colour coding was a great help to immediately identify potential problems.

Historical data was already available for Hosts and Virtual machines (up to 30days), so the basics were covered: mostly real time and historical data.

But because we always strive to improve the solution we are providing (even those for free like this one), we weren’t satisfied.

So we released vScope V2.

With HTML5, it was also a great step for a mobile version, providing even more information and in a clearer view for both desktop and mobile users.

And the support for API access was implemented, enabling you to import vScope data in your own monitoring software.

We also renewed vScope for a V3, but the changes were mainly on the infrastructure side to help us grow and maintain it while keeping performance at its best for you.

Hello 2023, hello vROps:

As a VMware user, you are familiar with vRealize Operations Manager (now called VMWare Aria Operations).

This tool from VMware allows you to monitor, detect and anticipate. Which is great, but it can be a bit overwhelming as a lot of its configuration relies on the user.

vRealize Operations Manager has been available since vSphere 6 at OVHcloud and is still available for our customer should they wish to enable, configure and use it.

But sometimes, as humans, we want more without doing a lot more. And that’s exactly where our new version of vScope arrives.

Our new configuration-less monitoring tool for our VMware customers is using VMWare Aria Operations, so in fact, we’re dropping “vScope” altogether and moving to “vROps”.

You get the immediate benefit of a software developed by the editor, made for his own products and deployed and maintained by OVHcloud, and enabled automatically on your VMware infrastructure hosted by OVHcloud.

This OVHcloud dashboard will appear in Dashboards > OVHcloud – Historical Dashboard.

As usual, you can easily monitor and identify patterns in CPU/memory usage, monitor storage usage and more.

You can also easily check which Virtual Machines are overprovisioned in terms of compute resources. And since you’ll be reducing the assigned (or even reserved) resources, you can use the freed cores/memory for even more VM and containers.

Without having to add physical servers to your cluster, so you optimize your usage and your budget.

You get the usual (real) real-time information, the historical data, the mobile friendly version, the API compatibility.

And on top of it: the ability to send emails in case of alerts, the option to personalize the dashboards with our Professional Services experts.

You can also create additional dashboards as you would have done in the past if you were using vROps already. This one will stay available for a quick general overview of your resources.

So we do hope that integrating vScope in vROps will satisfy you and provide you with even more insight and tools to get the best of your VMware on OVHcloud services.

Let us know directly in our Discord channel or through the usual Mailing List.

As much as « Tanzu » was expected and follows the release of Tanzu CE, the availability of vNKP can come as a surprise.

Let’s see TKGm first:
It is VMware implementation of Kubernetes (K8S) cluster independently of your environment : on-premises, dedicated Cloud or Public Cloud . This allows your K8S implementation to be under control and secure wherever you run it . You can simply move the TKGm configuration from one site/instance to the other.

With TKGm, sources are hosted, maintained and controled by VMware. That’s more security and stability.

And so it means that you can use your VMware Hosted Private Cloud managed by OVHcloud for your K8S clusters! Benefiting from both OVHcloud and VMware levels of security and reliability.

TKGm is different from the TKGs solution which requires access to the Vsphere layer. And some public instances do not allow this. TKGm gives you the freedom to run it wherever you want it.

In order to maintain interoperability, redundancy and to let you chose the tool you need (Innovation for freedom) OVHcloud proposes the Tanzu implementation on VMware with the least amount of constraints, with security, reversability and ease of migration.

Installation is simplified thanks to a pre-packaged Ubuntu image, ready to be configured. But you can still do it your own way.

Even if the VMware on OVHcloud platform is managed , you stay completely free to manage your containers within a standard offer as well as with our VSAN and NSX-T options.
You can benefit this way from the high-performance NVMe storage and/or the improved NSX-T security for you containers.

The platform being SecNumCloud qualified, your containers benefits from the ANSSI certification as well, should you use this environment.

We have a complete and detailed OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud by VMware documentation, and should the need arise, our Professionnal Services team can assist you further.

Here you have our Installing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guide and the official WMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid documentation.

Let’s see vSphere Native Key Provider (vNKP), vSphere new integrated Key generator.

Included natively and free of charge in VSphere 7.0u2 (thanks to the Enterprise Plus license used at OVHCloud), vNKP brings to your VCenter server and your ESXi an all-incluse key generator and hosting solution for your encryption « at rest » and vTPM.

vNKP is an internal VMware mechanism and can not be accessed outside of your Vcenter/ESXi/VSphere . It is not a standard KMS (Key Management Server).

The immediat benefit is the increased security for your VM without having to subscibe a PCI-DSS or SecNumCloud offer and without having to purchase and maintain a 3rd party KMS… as long as you only use it for your VMware environment.

Integrating encryption key management to Vcenter/VSphere is a step forward increasing simplification of security management… thus increasing security. The easier it is to implement and manage security, the wider the adoption. Which in turn means a more secure platform.

Additionally, integrating the encryption key delivery to your existing platform saves you a lot of headaches regarding redundancy, resilience and access to the KMS. Handling all of these for an external or 3rd party KMS can be complicated, thus expensive. vNKP reduces the complexity of encryption key management for your VMWare environment.

Thanks to this free feature, all your VM can benefit from robust and secure encryption, and if you want to migrate from a 3rd party KMS to vNKP, a simple shallow key operation is required; there is no need for a complete decryption/new encryption process. Completely invisible for the users.

TPM 2.0 support is native through the use of vTPM. Your workload/VM requiring this level of security can now move to OVHcloud without having to invest on real servers on premises with a physical TPM chip.

Of course, as with a 3rd party KMS, regular backups of the key and configuration are highly recommended, but that is not a surprise…

Using vNKP and Vsphere « virtual machine encryption » service allows you not only to encrypt the VM but also their configuration files. This way, you get the benefits of a complete protection from unwanted tampering.

But that doesn’t protect you from data loss or corruption, so backups and/or replication are still highly recommended to recover and keep your business up and running.

For more information, see our guide and the official VMware documentation.

In conclusion, the OVHcloud / VMware platform keeps getting new features. The two described above allow you to migrate and deploy your containers easily on OVHCloud Hosted Private Cloud managed environment and reinforce security using the inegrated Vsphere Key Provider.

More features are coming soon (anyone said «TKGs » ?) and I will have the pleasure to describe them in another article.