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

Chapter 2. Identify Automation and Standardization Opportunities

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."                                                                             - Lao Tzu

In this case, it is the journey of building the SDDC and fully automating your data center. Automation is the key word and it is very worthwhile to spend a fair amount of time to identify tasks for automation. The difficult part is automating the right things, efficiently and helpful for the daily operations of a modern data center.

Automation itself is not a new topic within a data center. There has always been automation present in form of scripts called by date controlled task managers. In the Linux world, it is usually crond calling command-line scripts. In Windows, this can be done using the task manager.

However, the SDDC automation approach is bigger than a local task based automation. It needs to introduce automation across many different tools, infrastructure, and departments...