VCF Green Insight

Traditional data centres rely on dedicated physical appliances for routing, firewalling, load balancing, IDS/IPS, WAF, and SAN storage. Each carries embodied carbon from manufacturing (Scope 3) and operational carbon from electricity consumption (Scope 2).

VMware Cloud Foundation provides software-defined alternatives: NSX for routing, vDefend for firewalling and IDS/IPS, Avi for load balancing and WAF, and vSAN for hyper-converged storage. Replacing physical hardware eliminates manufacturing emissions and reduces power draw.

Use the toggles below to model each transformation. Figures are derived from published Product Carbon Footprints, vendor datasheets, and ADEME estimates. See the Methodology page for full details.

Transformation Impact

Service Life:
PUE:
Grid Carbon: kgCO2e/kWh

Transformations

SAN → vSAN
Replace FC SAN with hyper-converged vSAN (local NVMe SSDs)
Scope 3: -7,121 Scope 2: -38,797 kgCO2e
Routers → NSX Edge
Replace physical core routers with NSX Edge virtual routers
Scope 3: -6,248 Scope 2: -28,085 kgCO2e
Firewall → vDefend
Replace physical firewalls with vDefend distributed gateway firewall
Scope 3: -1,178 Scope 2: -7,152 kgCO2e
LB → Avi LB
Replace physical load balancers with Avi software load balancer
Scope 3: -1,794 Scope 2: -9,307 kgCO2e
IDS → vDefend IDS
Replace physical IDS/IPS with vDefend distributed IDS
Scope 3: -1,420 Scope 2: -11,757 kgCO2e
WAF → Avi WAF
Replace physical WAF with Avi web application firewall
Scope 3: -2,260 Scope 2: -14,696 kgCO2e

Infrastructure Items

Category Label Product Qty W Scope 3 kgCO2e Scope 2 kgCO2e
server Management Hosts PowerEdge R760 (SAN) 4 700 4,394.60 45,720.19
server Workload Hosts PowerEdge R760 (SAN) 5 700 5,493.25 57,150.24
storage FC Switches Brocade G630 2 308 2,516.00 10,058.44
storage Storage Controller NetApp AFF A400 1 1100 2,480.00 17,961.50
storage Storage Shelves (populated) NS224 Shelf (24x 3.84TB NVMe) 2 540 9,881.28 17,634.93
network Core Routers Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 2 960 6,248.00 31,350.99
network ToR Switches Cisco Nexus 93180YC-FX3 2 750 5,214.00 24,492.96
security Firewalls Fortinet FortiGate 600E 2 244 1,178.00 7,968.38
security Load Balancers F5 BIG-IP i5800 2 320 1,794.00 10,450.33
security IDS/IPS Cisco Firepower 2130 2 400 1,420.00 13,062.91
security WAF Imperva SecureSphere X6510 2 500 2,260.00 16,328.64