DA10--VA-25-00016458 Enterprise Virtualization Modernization. RFI

. This request does not constitute a solicitation for proposals or the authority to enter into negotiations to award a contract. No funds have been authorized, appropriated or received for this effort. The information provided may be used by the VA in developing its acquisition strategy. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response. The Government does not intend to pay for the information submitted in response to this RFI. INTRODUCTION It is requested that all contractors interested in participating in this effort please note their interest and provide indication of their respective capabilities to perform the effort described in the Performance Work Statement (PWS) for Enterprise Virtualization Modernization. See draft PWS below for details. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code for this RFI is 513210 Software Publishers, with a Small Business Size Standard of $47 Million, and Product Service Code (PSC) of DA10. If this is within your capability, please provide your response no later than November 5, 2024 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time. Be advised that set-aside decisions may be made based on the information provided in response to this RFI. Responses should be as complete and informative as possible. DRAFT PWS REQUIREMENTS Enterprise Virtualization Modernization Requirements: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information and Technology (OIT) has a requirement to adapt and modernize their virtualization infrastructure to support multi-cloud and expanded automation options. The current environment is predominately VMware by Broadcom, with over 50,000 virtual machines, 4,000 virtualization hosts, at 300+ locations. VA is asking industry to provide capabilities, services, and pricing to scope a possible replacement, to include advanced technical support and migration services from legacy environment. Software and Software Licensing Provide virtualization software, software licensing, and/or managed service provider offerings to encompass VA virtualization infrastructure with the following characteristics: Approximately 200,000 physical compute cores 12,000 physical processor sockets 2.4PB RAM 2PB hyperconverged storage 180PB of traditional storage (FC, NFS, iSCSI, NVMe/TCP) Industry should account for the following existing infrastructure limitations and capabilities: 300+ physical locations, latency of up to 150ms rtt from central data center locations or 250ms rtt from cloud service providers; WAN MTU not to exceed 1460 bytes. Approximately 1000 virtual machines are supported by warm-site replication and automatic disaster recovery and shall be accounted for by replacement offering. Approximately 60% Windows-based, 35% Linux-based, 5% vendor appliance and/or containerized applications. Existing container environment is OpenShift based, proposed solution must support native container hosting and management; as well as OpenShift based containerization. Traditional storage presentation from highly-available appliances, providing NFS, iSCSI, or NVMe/TCP storage presentation. IPv4 and IPv6 Traditional Network Presentation of layer 2 services, routing functions are not extended to virtualization infrastructure. Uplinks are typically trunked, without bonding to highly-available switches using 10 or 25gbe. Hypervisor/OS storage may be utilizing Secure Digital (SD Card) for minority of sites, M.2, or RAID 1 drives for majority of sites. The minority of sites utilizing hyperconverged infrastructure are primarily Dell VxRail or VMware vSAN locations. All hosts are currently supported by existing VMware by Broadcom Hardware Compatibility Guide. All hosts, guests and management infrastructure are configured to FISMA High, with the minority configured to PCI DSS and/or IL5. Solution must support Two-Factor Authentication globally, using principal of least privilege, using VA active directory or Azure Entra AD credentials. Automation Requirements: VA expects a product to support multi-cloud automation and deployments, to include PXE or on-demand ISO boot provisioned virtual machines across all virtualization hosts, allowing customer (product owner) non-administrative console access to the provisioned virtual machines. This product shall support both on-premises and external cloud service providers, both government and commercial offerings. The product shall allow custom scripting or ancillary script engine or automation engine services to provide all Day-0, Day-1, Day-2 customization tasks to include changes to VM provisioning, guest configurations, security configurations and changes. VA requires training be provided integral to software offering. Training shall include virtual instructor led training for at least 8 sessions with up to 24 VA attendees; per-year. On-Demand Computer Based Training shall be available, without limit, to VA employees and designated contractor staff. Virtual instructor led training shall include installation and maintenance of proposed solution; to include advanced design and troubleshooting. VA does not require software providers be a commercial off the shelf (COTS) offering. VA will consider software offerings without integrated support, where the software responsibilities (i.e. security configuration) are provided by the service provider. Provide 1, 3, and 5-year pricing for all encompassing licensing; for this request, managed service providers can include hardware and software providers where the hardware, software, and the services providers are the same (primarily cloud service provider offerings). If the product provided is a commercial offering requiring warranty, support, or maintenance subscriptions, pricing must be included in offering. If a commercial offering is provided, VA requires 24x7x365 day 30-minute initial response support, to include cleared support staff, FboNotice cause analysis and automated and manual escalations. If offering is not a commercial support offering, professional services to provide above support equivalency must be included in overall Software and Software Licensing cost. For commercial offerings, all source code, at no time will manufacturer firmware or subcomponent firmware, source code or software be developed, sourced, or provided by the following countries: Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Crimea region of Ukraine, People's Republic of China, Venezuela; or any country that is prohibited from export of U.S cryptography modules; or restricted imports, export, reexport or materiel modifications with information technology, cryptography components. Countries included in the Wassenaar Arrangement are generally not included in these restrictions, with the exception of Russia and other countries not identified as country group A:1 exempt in Export Administration Regulations (EAR) Supplement No. 1 to Part 740. Managed Services Provide professional services for two primary functions, design, engineering, installation, maintenance, and lifecycle management of provided Software and Software Licensing. To include scripting, provisioning support of all Day-x tasks and taskings, security vulnerability remediation and high-level operations support. This shall be follow-the-sun support, for US EST 0800-1800 daily; with after-hours support and after-hours maintenance tasks pe