VMWare
- a truly modern Software-Defined Data Centre
(SDDC)
An SDDC is characterised by several unique factors
as compared to traditional data centres. Physical servers, networking
gear, and storage arrays are abstracted from the workloads that run
in the SDDC. Virtualization not only decouples workloads from hardware
but also makes data centre services easy and inexpensive to configure,
manage, and consume
.Applications in an SDDC run entirely on logically
defined resources for which the underlying hardware is abstracted away.
In this sense, the SDDC architecture is hardware agnostic, with the
requirements as basic as servers, with disks, and a simple packet-forwarding
network backplane.
An SDDC brings automation, operations, governance,
and business insight to IT through a cloud management platform. Unlike
legacy management tools, the cloud management platform is purpose built
and deeply integrated with the underlying virtualization layer. This
integration provides comprehensive insight, automation, and operations
to a dynamic data centre environment, enabling IT to easily orchestrate
provisioning, management, and monitoring across all SDDC infrastructures
and workloads. Ultimately, all elements of data centre infrastructure,
as well as the applications and services running on that infrastructure,
are managed through a software-based control plane and are automated
to the fullest extent possible.
An SDDC architecture is also geographically agnostic
because the logically defined infrastructure resources can span across
data centres, including those owned by IT or cloud serviceproviders
leveraging the same SDDC platform. Using the SDDC cloud management platform
to holistically manage these data centres, those of IT and those of
the service provider—enables enterprises to operate a hybrid cloud.
Finally, people and processes in an SDDC evolve from manual, day-to-day
operations to supporting business priorities by offering infrastructure,
applications, data, and IT services to business users on demand.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) provides an integrated
stack which bundles Compute Virtualization (VMware vSphere), Storage
Virtualization (VMware vSAN), Network Virtualization (VMware NSX) and
Cloud Management and Monitoring (VMware vRealize Suite) into a single
platform which can be deployed on-premises wherein the customer is responsible
for managing the physical infrastructure and the virtual machine workloads
or can also run As-a-Service in public cloud.