How Metrobank is tapping VMware Cloud Foundation

Philippine bank Metrobank has achieved a 14% year-on-year cost saving on its VMware licensing by fully committing to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud platform. This comes as many other VMware users face huge cost increases following Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualisation giant.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of VMware Explore in Las Vegas, Sherbert Dela Cruz, head of infrastructure at Metrobank, explained that the bank’s journey to creating a standardised private cloud was key to navigating the licensing changes that caught other businesses off guard.

The transformation began in 2020 to address a siloed IT environment with disparate hypervisors and tools, including Hyper-V and vSphere. The bank decided to standardise its infrastructure by creating its own private cloud, dubbed Skynet, selecting VCF as its platform of choice.

Metrobank’s early adoption of VCF proved to be a significant advantage when renewing its licensing agreement. While companies using only individual components like vSphere faced significant price jumps when forced to move to the bundled VCF subscription, Metrobank was already leveraging the full platform.

“The cost turned out to be lower on a year-over-year basis,” said Dela Cruz. “Buying VCF for one year is cheaper compared to the old perpetual licenses plus one year of maintenance and support. It turned out to be about 14% cheaper.”

However, Dela Cruz acknowledged that over a five-year total cost of ownership model, the new subscription is about 5-10% more expensive than the old perpetual model. He noted that this was a far cry from the steep hikes reported elsewhere.

“It’s still not what you hear in the market, where others experienced a higher jump in the cost,” he said. “Talking with some of my friends and other banks, it’s primarily because they were not using all of the products in VCF while we were.”

According to an internal study, Metrobank uses over 90% of the products in the VCF platform, including vSAN for storage virtualisation, vDefend security services, NSX for software-defined networking, the Avi load balancer, VMware Site Recovery Manager, and the Tanzu Greenplum data warehouse.

Beyond cost savings, the private cloud journey enabled Metrobank to modernise its software, moving from monolithic applications towards an application programming interface-driven architecture.

However, not all systems could be modernised and moved. For very old applications where institutional knowledge has been lost or supplier support has ended, the bank created a separate cluster that runs in an isolated environment and contained using micro-segmentation to prevent any potential security breach from spreading.

The move to VCF also helped with a major integration project when Metrobank acquired a credit card company in 2022. By extending VCF to the acquired company’s vSphere environment, the bank could stretch out its clusters and network, making the migration of production workloads significantly easier.

A key part of the transformation involved restructuring people and processes. Metrobank broke down its traditional, siloed infrastructure teams – server, network, firewall and database – and created a cross-functional group of cloud administrators.

“We have been telling our teams that they have to become cloud administrators,” said Dela Cruz. “You may be very skilled in server administration, but now, because we are also using NSX and vDefend, you need to have some knowledge of networking, security, and even databases.”

He added that the VCF user interface helped his teams make this transition by allowing them to perform tasks outside their core expertise without deep technical knowledge. “A server guy can go into the NSX page and create different network segments without necessarily knowing networking, as long as he puts in the guardrails,” said Dela Cruz.