This paper focuses on how existing VMware customers can gain a strategic advantage by leveraging SoftLayer’s Infrastructure as a Service, while retaining the capabilities of their vSphere infrastructure. It assumes a cursory understanding of the features and functionality of VMware vSphere, as well as basic familiarity with SoftLayer. The goal of this paper is to educate customers on the benefits of migrating VMware environments into SoftLayer in a hybrid cloud configuration. This paper is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or implementation guide for running VMware vSphere in a SoftLayer data center.