In a move designed to increase its hybrid cloud capabilities, IBM is offering a cloud service with VMware.

The service will allow customers to extend existing on-premise VMware infrastructure into the IBM Cloud through NSX.

One benefit of this is that users will be able to perform live migrations, meaning that they will be able to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime.

A long-distance VMware vSphere vMotion of distances up to 150ms round trip time is possible to perform. The companies say that this is a 15x increase in RTT combined with the SoftLayer private network.

For businesses, it means that they will be able to run a single VMware environment to do live work migrations between data centres.

Also on offer is storage integration with VMware Virtual SAN, giving the user dedicated storage and profile-based management.

Additionally, IBM is enhancing its Cloudbuilder Professional Services capabilities in order to include full support for VMware’s vSphere 6. The goal behind this is so that users can set up a vSphere implementation quickly and start migrating workloads.