Rackspace’s VMware private cloud managed service is now available everywhere: in Rackspace data centers, companies’ own data centers, and third-party colocation facilities.

Rackspace originally launched the service — a fully managed, single-tenant, dedicated VMware private cloud — at last summer’s VMworld. But the managed service provider soon started hearing a common compliant from customers, said Rackspace vice president and general manager Peter FitzGibbon.

“We love your product, but you don’t offer it in all of the locations I may possibly need, such as specific geographies where Rackspace doesn’t have a data center, or in specific locations in the U.S., or within their own specific data center,” FitzGibbon said.

The new service addresses these issues “by rolling racks into the customer’s data center or colocation facility,” FitzGibbon explained. Geo-expansion is a common use case, he added, citing a large consulting company that wants to provide services in the Middle East.

It also addresses data sovereignty laws and compliance requirements for industries such as the pharmaceutical sector by enabling a managed private cloud within these companies’ data centers.

The service also supports high-performance analytics and addresses low-latency requirements. “How can we locate our compute resources as close as possible to the customer, be it a financial institution or other where every millisecond counts,” FitzGibbon said.

Rackspace private cloud service customers also see a 39 percent savings versus building and operating private clouds themselves.

Also at VMworld 2017, Rackspace said it would work with VMware to offer a managed service based on VMware Cloud on AWS, which is VMware’s software stack running in Amazon Web Services’ public cloud. That managed service is also in the works, FitzGibbon said, adding that VMware just last month added a function that allows companies like Rackspace to build services on top of VMware on AWS.

Rackspace doesn’t have a launch date, but “we are actively working with VMware on that right now,” FitzGibbon said.

The new VMware private cloud anywhere service sets the stage for another managed cloud partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) first announced in November 2017. At the time, Rackspace and HPE launched a managed private cloud service based on OpenStack with pay-as-you-go pricing. The two companies also said they planed to offer similar pay-per-use private clouds based on VMware and Microsoft Azure Stack in 2018.

“This is laying the groundwork for that solution,” FitzGibbon said.

Rackspace this week also added bare-metal functionality to its managed hosting portfolio, which it says allows companies to provision infrastructure on demand and have it delivered in minutes.