OVHcloud, a French-based global cloud player and the major cloud player in Europe, has announced Public VCF as-a-Service, a managed VMware solution designed to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) small businesses and managed service providers (MSPs) modernize their VMware deployments while keeping control of their costs. With licensing and cloud spending being a major concern for every IT decision maker, OVHcloud Public VCF as-a-Service, which is built on VMware Cloud Director (VCD), offers superior performance and security for a fully managed VMware solution, while remaining scalable.
So who is the target for this, especially given that Broadcom, VMware’s owner, has become focused on larger businesses?
“It is for both SMEs, and for small businesses first,” said Guilliame Gilbert, sfor small companies who want this private cloud infrastructure – but companies who don’t have budget for larger things. Relatively few MSPs take this kind of product. They want the older offer and they prefer that.”
Many partners, on the other hand, prefer VMware
“We have been working with VMWare over 15 years now,” Gilbert said. “It helps to have a good relationship with them. OVHcloud is a Pinnacle Broadcom partner, which is a high level partner.”
“We started to have our first offering with VMware more than 15 years ago, when we sold them a cloud,” said Laurent Blin, OVHcloud Product Marketing leader. We always position our products for all. We extended from customers who were more positioning for large enterprise. Now when we position this offer with the new pricing model with Broadcom – we understood their model. We stayed in a room talking with them for three weeks.”
What we had to discuss was what can we offer the customer.
“We can’t deal with small business with this kind of deal,” Blin said. “We needed to launch a new product, and we did that in April 2024. We told customers and partners that if you want a VMware alternative, we can help you to move to that offer. In January 2025, we started to migrate some small customers to this offer. This kind of offer was new for some customers – who were not the ones we have worked with for many years. They were companies with 4-5 experts tops – not more. They were looking for this kind of offer.”
Blin said this was different for their more traditional customer. The streamlined approach allows users to access only the necessary components, without the complexity of the full VMware suite, while remaining easily manageable
“In the portfolio now, we are more targeted for smaller customers, and they want something that is more managed at scale,” he indicated.
Still, he emphasized that the customer base today varied greatly.
“We have really large customers in all regions,” he said.
“Managed VMware is something that we have had for many years,” Blin said. “We also have two other products where we can provide an unmanaged offer from OVHcloud, and then run VCF on top of the solution.”
Blin said that this kind of offer assumes that small business can continue to modernize small business, which he thinks is the case.
“VMware is one of the best technologies to run workloads with virtualization,” he said “People really like the technology. The changes from last year and the new pricing model, we don’t see as a good thing. When the technology is reversible and open, we manage that part. There is still value in VMware in Canada. We have the best technology on the market without managing it, and with our value, we were not affected by the changes. It was more the small customers with OVH who needed to find a new direction.”
Blin said that when they launched Public VCF as a Service, the goal was to set it up with the same level of services.
“For that you needed things like Microsoft licensing, and other things that was requested for the new products.” he said “We protect the virtual machine. We are now migrating to VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation 9) a virtual machine moving to another host thanks to their technologies. We manage all this with VMware Cloud Director. The customer can have many packs. One wants 300 at the same time. We also white list here. This product is a good one and a good answer for many customers.”
OVHcloud Public VCF as-a-Service starts with a pack of 16vCPU and 64 GB of RAM. Users can dynamically allocate theses resources between VMs, and scale the capacity as needed through additional packs, ensuring greater cost efficiency based on their current needs.
OVHcloud Public VCF as-a-Service benefits from up to 5 Gbps guaranteed and unmetered public bandwidth and up to 5 Gbps of unmetered private bandwidth, further participating in guaranteeing predictable pricing.
A number of essential tools are provided to complement Public VCF as-a-service such as a library of pre-configured images to make deployments much easier, and a managed backup solution powered by Veeam. New features will be rolled-out throughout the months to support Public VCF as-a-Service, ensuring it remains a cutting-edge solution.