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

Identifying processes and how to automate them


This is one of the main discussion points when it comes to an SDDC. The concept of automation across departments is dependent on the pre-existing processes. The first step of automating them is actually identifying all their stages and requirements. This might be a tricky task but is very important for applying all SDDC benefits later on.

How would a perfect process look like to be automated?

  • Clear defined steps and stations
  • The execution of the process is preapproved; no approvals required during runtime
  • Well defined requirements and outcomes for each station
  • All used tools are programmable (API, scripts, CLI, and so on)
  • All endpoints/tools can be reached from a single location
  • All (yet) manual tasks can be automated using workflows

Again, this reflects the description of a perfect candidate. There might be a chance that you have processes, which fulfill only parts of these criteria. If that is the case, it is very important to be able to change the...