About Telstra Private Cloud
Q: What's Telstra Private Cloud?
Available in Sydney and Melbourne, Telstra Private Cloud offers a virtual data centre built on dedicated infrastructure, owned and hosted in Australia. Telstra Private Cloud is build on Dell Technologies market leading storage infrastructure, and VMware virtualisation combined with Telstra’s automation, networking and security. Built to be secure by design, the platform is certified against the ISO27001 security framework.
Designed and built with automation at its core, your private cloud environment will typically be available within hours of ordering. From there you can connect to your existing private network via Cloud Connector™ and or the Internet.
Full access to a dedicated VMware vCenter and NSX-T for the management of your virtual machines and network elements is within your control, while Telstra manages the physical infrastructure with 24x7 proactive monitoring, patching and updates.
Telstra Private Cloud enables a hybrid cloud experience through Telstra Cloud Sight, where you can purchase and manage both public cloud and private cloud through a single native portal with integrated cloud connectivity. Add on Telstra Cloud Connectorᵀᴹ for secure integration of Telstra’s Adaptive Networks and enable private network connectivity to your cloud environments.
Q: What features does Telstra Private Cloud offer?
- Dedicated physical infrastructure typically accessible on the same day
- Secure and connected data centres located in Australia, with data residing onshore
- Managed platform infrastructure, designed to exceed a 99.9% availability target, and certified against the ISO27001 security control framework
- Build on enterprise-grade infrastructure in partnership with Dell Technologies, VMware and Equinix
- Self-managed virtual data centre with access to a dedicated VMware vCenter and NSX Manager
- Bare metal on latest generation of PowerEdge servers and Intel CPUs
- Secure and reliable integrated network connectivity with Cloud Connector
- Powered by Telstra Cloud Sight– a single, easy to use platform where you can buy, activate and manage your service.
Q: What benefits can I expect?
- High Performance – with bare-metal infrastructure and storage dedicated to running your applications and storing your data, your applications are not competing for resources with other cloud customers.
- More Control – the flexibility to virtualise your dedicated infrastructure in a way you would like, allowing you to configure a combination of compute and storage, and provide additional resilience and redundancy as your business requires.
- Flexibility – Outsource your data centre and platform infrastructure management with monitoring, security management and updating managed by Telstra, while you maintain control of your virtual machines
- Predictive Billing – Optimise your ICT investment and choose from 1, 12, 24 and 36 month contracts, with greater discounts applied to longer-term commitments.
- Scalability – Purchase additional hosts and storage as your business requires.
- VMware Technology – virtualisation technology from VMware, with access to a dedicated vCenter Server and NSX-T Manager for compute and network configuration.
Q: How do I use it?
You'll need a Cloud Sight account to start. After you've registered you can begin adding a Telstra Private Cloud to your Cloud Sight tenancy. This creates a virtual data centre in a location of your choice.
You can begin with a minimum of two or more hosts. Hosts are physically separate from other cloud customers so processing capacity is dedicated to your use. Hosts are deployed into clusters to provide capacity and logical segmentation for networking, security and billing.
Once your virtual data centre is activated, you can access the virtualisation layer via the VMware native toolsets (vCenter, NSX) to create your own virtual servers and manage your virtual network. Portal links to vCenter and NSX are available on your Telstra Cloud Sight dashboard.
Q: How do I access the Telstra Private Cloud I purchased?
You'll be notified by email once your service is active. To access your virtual data centre, you'll need to log into to SSL VPN or link your environment to Cloud Connector. See instructions to set up your SSL VPN for the first time here. Once enabled, portal links to vCenter and NSX will be available on your Telstra Cloud Sight dashboard.
Q: Where is Telstra Private Cloud located?
Telstra Private Cloud is located in Sydney and Melbourne. You can select the location of your virtual data centre from the drop-down on the Telstra Private Cloud ordering page on Cloud Sight.
All resources will be in a dedicated virtual data centre in your chosen location. Any additional resources will also reside at the same location.
We plan to open in additional locations in Australia. Please consult your Telstra Representative for availability of these locations
Q: What's a virtual data centre?
A virtual data centre is a collection of Telstra Private Cloud resources such as compute, memory, storage and networking. It’s a virtual representation of a physical data centre complete with hosts, storage clusters and networking components hosted in any of our actual data centres. A virtual data centre (VDC) another name for a Telstra Private Cloud tenancy. By default, every VDC is logically isolated from the others and can only communicate with any of them if you choose to allow it.
Q: How do I add additional users to vCenter, NSX-T and SSL VPN?
You will need to submit a request via the vCenter Plug-in, available under the 'Telstra Cloud' icon in your vCenter.
See instructions to add users here.
Q: I’m an international customer. Can I buy this service?
This service is currently not offered outside Australia. Contact your Telstra Account Representative in your region for details on when the service may be available.
Q: Who do I contact with more questions?
For any support requests, contact the Cloud Service Desk at CloudServicesSupport@online.telstra.com.au or call 1800 620 345.
For any product related queries, please contact your Telstra Account Representative.
For further administration guidance, refer to our Telstra Private Cloud Admin Guide.
Technical details
Q: How is my Telstra Private Cloud isolated from other virtual data centres?
Your resources are separated from other customers on four layers – management, network, compute and data. Tenant networks and compute are all completely isolated from other tenants with no shared points of contact, the hypervisor used by the tenancy is not shared with any other workloads. Firewalls in the tenancy are controlled by the customer.
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Management Isolation |
Each customer has a dedicated, single tenanted SSL VPN concentrator, vCenter Server and NSX-T Manager |
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Network isolation |
Within the DC, we maintain low-level network separation between customers using carrier-grade equipment and technologies. We employ encrypted external communication channels (via SSL VPN) for management access from public networks. Our transit networks between customers’ virtual servers and data storage areas are isolated from customer networks. |
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Compute isolation |
You are the sole occupant and user of every host you purchase. This maintains physical computing separation between customers in TPC DCs. |
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Data isolation |
We dedicate entire volumes to a single customer (presented as VMFS datastores). |
Q: What edition and version of VMware is used?
vSphere 7.0 and NSX-T 3.1.
Q: Do I bring my own VMware licensing?
No, all of the VMware licensing required is included in the monthly fees for Telstra Private Cloud.
Q: How do I connect privately from Next IP to my virtual data centre?
A private connection from Next IP to your virtual data centre always runs over Telstra Cloud Connector (TCC). Telstra manage the BGP between Next IP and Telstra Private Cloud via Cloud Connector. For instructions on how to link Cloud Connector to your Telstra Private Cloud, see here.
Q: What storage is included and how much storage can I purchase?
To help you get started, each host purchase includes 1,000GB (1TB) of standard flash tier storage by default. You can add to or reduce your datastore through the vCenter plug-in in increments of 10GB. The minimum size of a datastore is 100GB and the maximum size of a datastore is 8TB.
There are two tiers of flash storage available:
| Tier | Description | Guidelines |
| Standard | Up to 1,000 IOPS per TB of purchased storage | Generally suitable for standard file, print and mixed workloads |
| Performance* | Up to 20,000 IOPS per TB of purchased storage | Designed to meet demanding workloads such as DBMS and analytics |
Telstra doesn't specifically cap the overall total amount of storage you can purchase. However, you must manage your individual datastores to comply with the points above and/or any limits imposed by vCenter.
You can also acquire or provide external storage through some other means, which includes Telstra products such as Telstra Virtual Storage. External storage is only visible at the Operating System level within a VM, using protocols such as iSCSI, CIFS/SMB or NFS. External storage cannot hold any VMDKs used within a TPC vDC, nor can a TPC-based host boot from it.
You can not upgrade storage from standard flash tier to performance flash tier, but you can remove/add storage without Early Termination Charges. For pricing information, see our pricing guide.
*Performance flash tier is not available at launch. Please contact your Telstra Account Representative to confirm availability.
For further technical guidance, refer to our Telstra Private Cloud User Guide
Charges and billing
Q: How will I be charged?
Telstra Private Cloud subscriptions are billed per month. Host, storage and additional IP address costs are billed with a fixed monthly fee. Any egress internet usage is charged by GB. See our pricing guide for details.
Q: How will I be billed?
All charges, additional usage and any applicable add-on fees will be charged to your Telstra account, all of which you'll see on your monthly bill. You can also view your monthly charges in the ‘Billing’ tab of your Telstra Private Cloud service in Telstra Cloud Sight.
Q: Are there any set-up charges?
There are no set-up fees for Telstra Private Cloud.
Q: How do I cancel my subscription?
Please contact the Cloud Service Desk if you wish to cancel your subscription at CloudServicesSupport@online.telstra.com.au or call 1800 620 345. Note you may be charged Early Termination Charges if you cancel your subscription during your contract term. For more information, please see Our Customer Terms.
Partners
Q: How do I add my partner code into my customer’s order?
You can select your partner name from the drop-down list on the first page of the Telstra Private Cloud ordering screen. This is the only step required to ensure commissions flow through. If your organisation’s name is not on the list, contact Cloud Concierge here. The list of partners is validated against the Telstra Enterprise Partner Finder.