The United States Air Force (USAF) is planning a major upgrade of its virtualized infrastructure environment.

A tender from the Department of Defense (DoD) shows the government body is seeking a resilient multisite architecture using two new Cisco UCS-C220 M8S servers deployed across separate buildings. The new deployment is designed to improve failover and disaster recovery capabilities.

The upgrade will introduce a VMware vSAN (virtual storage area network) layer and create failover targets for workloads currently running on two older Cisco UCS-C220 M6 servers. Both the legacy M6 systems and the new M8S nodes will make up a unified VMware vCenter management environment. The Air Force also plans to establish workload affinity rules to keep primary workloads on the older M6 hardware unless a disruption occurs.

The statement of work requires contractors to validate low-latency 10 Gb/s (10G) or 25 Gb/s (25G) inter-building connectivity to support vSAN synchronization and vMotion traffic between facilities. Contractors must also conduct “building isolation” and “host failure” testing to verify seamless recovery operations.

The project joins other USAF endeavors, such as a network upgrade at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Detailed in mid-April, the Air Force is in the midst of procuring 400 Gb/s (400G) optical networking equipment for the 633rd Communications Squadron, which implements networks across the U.S. military’s war-fighting missions.

USAF is also actively looking into means to seamlessly and securely transmit data across land, sea, and space with its "Networking the Fight" project, a five-year, $70 million Air Force Research Laboratory project targeted at employing heterogeneous networks at the tactical edge.