Expanding virtualization to a broader range of workloads will certainly extend cost and availability benefits, but there is a much bigger opportunity on the table ?o virtualize rest of the data center so that all data center services become as inexpensive and easy to provision and manage as virtual machines.
Architecture for this fully virtualized infrastructure is software-defined data center(SDDC). Pioneered by VMware and recognized by industry and analysts alike, SDDC extends virtualization concepts that? already known ? abstraction, pooling and automation ?o all data center resources and services. SDDC dramatically speeds up and simplifies initial provisioning and ongoing management of fully virtualized compute, storage and networking by applying powerful policy-driven automation. Result is transformational levels of business agility along with operational efficiency, control and choice for IT and business alike. A software-defined data center is composed of various components:
In virtualization, each application and its operating system are encapsulated in a separate and completely isolated container called a virtual machine, decoupled from the physical host by hypervisor software. Many virtual machines can be run simultaneously on every computer, enormously improving availability, performance and resource utilization.
Virtualization lets reducing server count, standardize on low-cost x86 machines and greatly speed and simplify provisioning and management ? ll of which yield major savings in capital and operating expenses.
Industry standard for server virtualization is VMware vSphere, in use by more than 350,000 customers worldwide from Fortune 500 down to the smallest start-ups. Production-proven for the most demanding applications, vSphere provides foundational layer of VMware vCloud Suite VMware? software-defined data center platform.
Software-defined data center moves networking and security forward by creating same kind of software-driven abstraction layer that transformed computing. Similar benefits are achieved: Rapid programmatic provisioning, non-disruptive deployment, support for both legacy and new applications simultaneously on any general-purpose IP networking hardware and liberation of networking services from hardware-bound constraints.
In similar fashion to virtual machines, a virtual network presents logical network components ? logical switches, logical routers, logical firewalls, logical load balancers, logical VPNs and more ?o connected workloads.
Logical networks are programmatically created, provisioned and managed, utilizing the underlying physical network as a simple packet-forwarding backplane. As with server virtualization, any combination of logical network devices and security policies can be assembled into any topology. Network and security services are bound to each virtual machine and move with it, so workloads can be dynamically added or shifted without human intervention.
Network virtualization provides hardware independence by completely decoupling networking components from underlying physical network infrastructure. From end-host perspective, physical network model is faithfully reproduced and workloads see no difference. In terms of operations, change is transformative, enabling unprecedented automation of everything from network provisioning through deployment and maintenance.
Software-defined storage, a foundational component of software-defined data center, abstracts storage resources to enable pooling, replication and on-demand distribution. Result is a storage layer much like that of virtualized compute ?ggregated, flexible, efficient and scalable. Benefits are across-the-board reductions in cost and complexity of storage infrastructure.
Software-defined data center is much more easily and efficiently managed than physical infrastructure and delivers entirely new levels of agility through dramatically faster provisioning, policy-driven governance, elastic scalability and workload mobility across clouds.
VMware technology addresses and automates the full spectrum of software-defined data center operations. Businesses can even extend automated service provisioning, both operational and business management, to heterogeneous and hybrid cloud environments.