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

External services


Another use case for vRO is the creation of so-called external services or XaaS as VMware calls it. In vRA, XaaS means basically anything which can be automated and is orderable as a service.

By using vRO as a platform, a workflow can be an easy-to-create but yet powerful asset to provide third-party functionalities. Also, there are plenty of vRO plugins, which bring their own workflows for specific vendor products. By leveraging the XaaS feature, it is much easier to include those vendors and their products into the vRA portal. This means that also their offerings can be orderable as services by a given end user.

A couple of things are very helpful when using the XaaS feature of vRA with vRO:

  • An item is only shown in vRA if the workflow has an output parameter which vRA can understand.
  • Actions on XaaS services can be defined separately in vRA and assigned to the service. These actions are workflows on their own in vRO.
  • If an item should be destroyed after the service is deleted...