Book Image

Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

By : Valentin Hamburger
Book Image

Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

By: Valentin Hamburger

Overview of this book

VMware offers the industry-leading software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture that combines compute, storage, networking, and management offerings into a single unified platform. This book uses the most up-to-date, cutting-edge VMware products to help you deliver a complete unified hybrid cloud experience within your infrastructure. It will help you build a unified hybrid cloud based on SDDC architecture and practices to deliver a fully virtualized infrastructure with cost-effective IT outcomes. In the process, you will use some of the most advanced VMware products such as VSphere, VCloud, and NSX. You will learn how to use vSphere virtualization in a software-defined approach, which will help you to achieve a fully-virtualized infrastructure and to extend this infrastructure for compute, network, and storage-related data center services. You will also learn how to use EVO:RAIL. Next, you will see how to provision applications and IT services on private clouds or IaaS with seamless accessibility and mobility across the hybrid environment. This book will ensure you develop an SDDC approach for your datacenter that fulfills your organization's needs and tremendously boosts your agility and flexibility. It will also teach you how to draft, design, and deploy toolsets and software to automate your datacenter and speed up IT delivery to meet your lines of businesses demands. At the end, you will build unified hybrid clouds that dramatically boost your IT outcomes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Automation principles


Automation is a topic, which seems quite simple and straightforward at a first glance. Mostly it is seen as simple as:

  1. Find a repeatable task.
  2. Create a script or program to replace the manual steps.
  3. Add it to a trigger or scheduler for repeated execution.

While this is true for the actual scripting the first point is maybe the most important. There are many tasks in a modern data center, but not all are gold candidates for automation.

Day two automation

Automating daily manual tasks which are important to run and operate the data center and often performed by admins are so-called day two operations. Normally each data center has quite a few of them happening in the back to keep running. The very first step into the automation world should be to proper identify and define those tasks, as well as find a repeatable and clear way of executing them. Therefore you should think of a few criteria to successfully identify those tasks:

  • Often repeated per work day
  • Execution is straight...