Scope and Definitions
1.1 “Covered Services” means Instance or Management Components of the Service.
1.2 "Cluster" means a deployment of the dedicated Hosts, with a distributed storage system and associated networking that are managed via Management Components.
1.3 “Downtime” means
(a) For Management Components, the total number of minutes of Management Components Unavailability in a billing month. “Management Components Unavailability” means your inability to log into the VMware vCenter Server or VMware NSX Manager consoles, from the Instance associated VPC network, for at least a continuous 4-minute period, due to the failure of the Service;
(b) For an Instance, the total number of minutes of Cluster Unavailability in a billing month, for all Clusters in the Instance. “Cluster Unavailability” means you lose the connectivity of a Cluster from the Instance associated VPC network or lose disk access for all running VMware virtual machines in a Cluster for at least a continuous 4-minute period, due to the failure of the Service; and
(c) To calculate the Downtime under this SLA, the following required conditions of the Service itself and the other associated Alibaba Cloud services must be met:
(i) There are at least 3 Hosts in a Cluster;
(ii) The vSAN storage policy configuration of VMware virtual machines in the Cluster must ensure:
a) When the number of Hosts in the Cluster is 5 or less than 5, set FTT=1;
b) When the number of Hosts in the Cluster is 6 or more than 6, set FTT=2 or higher;
(iii) The vSAN storage space for the Cluster must have:
a) At least 25% of free space as Slack Space when the number of Hosts in the Cluster is 5 or less than 5;
b) At least 20% of free space as Slack Space when the number of Hosts in the Cluster is 6 or more than 6;
(iv) The vSAN storage space for the Cluster must ensure that at least one VMware virtual machine can be started; and
(v) When using a cloud firewall or other third-party network security tools for network access protection for the Service, ICMP protocol between the Instance and its associated VPC network subnet must be allowed.
1.4 “Exclusions” means any unavailability, suspension, or termination of the Service that is due to any of the following:
(a) suspension or termination described in Clause 8.2 of the Membership Agreement;
(b) events that are outside of our reasonable control, including any events of force majeure such as earthquakes, epidemic, downtime of the relevant submarine communication cables, failure of telecommunications infrastructure or systems, riots, Acts of God, etc.;
(c) events that result from any actions or inactions on your part in connection with your use of the Service;
(d) events that arise out of your or any third parties’ (not under our direct control) equipment, software, and/or technology;
(e) events that result from your failure to adhere to any required configurations for the use of the Service;
(f) events that result from your illegal or unlawful use of the Service, events that result from your breach of any of the terms and conditions of the Alibaba Cloud Product Terms, Terms of Use, or Membership Agreement;
(g) events that result from your non-payment of any charges payable to us;
(h) events that result from critical accidents or failure of the relevant internet service;
(i) events that result from your failure to ensure that the Service and other associated Alibaba Cloud services meet the conditions and requirements described in Clause 1.3(c) above;
(j) Scheduled Downtime; and,
(k) Emergency maintenance to address security vulnerabilities.
1.5 “Failures to Tolerate” or “FTT” means a configuration option in VMware vSAN storage policies, controlling the number of Host failures that can occur before the VMware virtual machines’ data may be lost. A setting of FTT=N (where N can be 1, 2, or 3) means that VMware virtual machines’ data should not result in data being lost even if up to N Hosts fail concurrently in the Cluster.
1.6 “Host” means a bare metal server running VMware ESXi.
1.7 “Instance” means a deployment of one or more Clusters and associated virtualized computing, storage and networking components.
1.8 "Management Components" means VMware vCenter Server and VMware NSX Manager. These components are not part of the Alibaba Cloud console.
1.9 “Monthly Service Fee” means the total charges paid by you for the Services in one billing month. For the upfront lump sum payment paid by you for the Service, Monthly Service Fee equals to the lump sum payment divided by the number of months of the Service covered by such payment.
1.10 “Monthly Uptime Percentage” means a percentage of Service availability calculated by reference to the following formula:
Monthly Uptime Percentage=100%×(total operating minutes in a billing month-Downtime)/total operating minutes in a billing month
1.11 “Scheduled Downtime” means the periods of Downtime relating to network, hardware, or service maintenance or upgrades. We will use reasonable commercial endeavors to provide written notice to you prior to the commencement of Scheduled Downtime.
1.12 “Slack Space” means a portion of the vSAN storage space in the Cluster, reserved for maintenance activities such as host maintenance, data evacuation, component rebuild, rebalancing operations, and virtual machine snapshots.
1.13 “Service Credit” means the percentage of the Monthly Service Fee for the affected Service that is credited to you for a validated claim following our service credit claim process under Section 3.
1.14 “Service Guarantee” shall have the meaning set forth in Section 2 of this SLA.