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Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers
Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers: Make the most of software-defined data centers with revolutionary VMware technologies

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Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

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,...

Automation principles

Automation is a topic, which seems quite simple and straightforward at a first glance. Mostly it is seen as simple as:

  1. Find a repeatable task.
  2. Create a script or program to replace the manual steps.
  3. Add it to a trigger or scheduler for repeated execution.

While this is true for the actual scripting the first point is maybe the most important. There are many tasks in a modern data center, but not all are gold candidates for automation.

Day two automation

Automating daily manual tasks which are important to run and operate the data center and often performed by admins are so-called day two operations. Normally each data center has quite a few of them happening in the back to keep running. The very first step into the automation world should be to proper identify and define those tasks, as well as find a repeatable and clear way of executing them. Therefore you should think of a few criteria to successfully identify those tasks:

  • Often repeated per work day
  • Execution is straight...

Script or workflow

It is important to understand the differences between a workflow and a script. As mentioned earlier, scripts are well established in the IT and originally were created to complete smaller tasks faster than a human could. Typically, scripts provide a single scripting language like Bash scripts in UNIX or PowerShell scripts in Windows. They can also be used to address complex tasks calling other scripts introducing multiple layers of relations to successfully complete a task. By following this logic, it can get very confusing very soon.

These scripts have to have logic to wait for their subscripts to come back with status information (success/failure/idle). This status queries are not as simple as it sounds and sometimes requires an own script, just to take care of all the subscripts running. Also, they can't simply be stopped since they have no control over the subscripts running in the background.

Script or workflow

Often scripts are maintained by a single admin, who is aware of their...

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...

IT delivery frameworks

Each IT has its own delivery frameworks. Even if it is a tiny company, there are some tools and actions which need to be performed to successfully deliver any application or service. The term framework means basically that it is a predefined routine or set of tools which should make its delivery easier. These normally consist out of installation tools used for application delivery, deployment tools for OSes and configuration tools for infrastructure. All together they form your delivery framework.

IT is important to understand what function each tool is covering. Sometimes there are tools which already cover a part of a process or an entire process. Then it is important to understand how to interact with those tools and at which point the automation has to handover the task to this tools. A very popular example is ticket managing systems. In bigger companies, they are typically part of the delivery process, even though they serve a rather passive role. However, they...

Organization automation examples

Many things have been covered already, but this section should give an overview what to think about when it comes to automation and standardization. Also, it will highlight how actual projects dealt with challenges and requirements which were discovered during the workflow creation.

Often, not all requirements for a deployment or delivery task in a data center may be known by all administrators. This is because traditionally, everyone is focusing on their own tasks until they hand it over to another group or department.

Simple VM deployment

The mission sounds quite simple: Deploy a VM in a data center out of a portal. The server administrator in of us might think: Easy, just create a template for the OS, add some customization (hostname, IP) and that's it.

Indeed, the first step was to create a template containing the OS. But there is also a requirement to use the most recent version of the OS for each deployment.

Note

The first side task was to create a...

Automation principles


Automation is a topic, which seems quite simple and straightforward at a first glance. Mostly it is seen as simple as:

  1. Find a repeatable task.
  2. Create a script or program to replace the manual steps.
  3. Add it to a trigger or scheduler for repeated execution.

While this is true for the actual scripting the first point is maybe the most important. There are many tasks in a modern data center, but not all are gold candidates for automation.

Day two automation

Automating daily manual tasks which are important to run and operate the data center and often performed by admins are so-called day two operations. Normally each data center has quite a few of them happening in the back to keep running. The very first step into the automation world should be to proper identify and define those tasks, as well as find a repeatable and clear way of executing them. Therefore you should think of a few criteria to successfully identify those tasks:

  • Often repeated per work day
  • Execution is straight...
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Key benefits

  • Learn how you can automate your data center operations and deploy and manage applications and services across your public, private, and hybrid infrastructure in minutes
  • Drive great business results with cost-effective solutions without compromising on ease, security, and controls
  • Transform your business processes and operations in a way that delivers any application, anywhere, with complete peace of mind

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

If you are an IT professional or VMware administrator who virtualizes data centers and IT infrastructures, this book is for you. Developers and DevOps engineers who deploy applications and services would also find this book useful. Data center architects and those at the CXO level who make decisions will appreciate the value in the content.

What you will learn

  • • Understand and optimize end-to-end processes in your data center
  • • Translate IT processes and business needs into a technical design
  • • Apply and create vRO workflow automation functionalities to services
  • • Deploy NSX in a virtual environment
  • • Technically accomplish DevOps offerings
  • • Set up and use vROPs to master the SDDC resource demands
  • • Troubleshoot all the components of SDDC
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Publication date : Dec 12, 2016
Length: 358 pages
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ISBN-13 : 9781786464378
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ISBN-13 : 9781786464378
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. The Software-Defined Data Center Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Identify Automation and Standardization Opportunities Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. VMware vSphere: The SDDC Foundation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. SDDC Design Considerations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. VMware vRealize Automation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. vRealize Orchestrator Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Service Catalog Creation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Network Virtualization using NSX Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. DevOps Considerations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Capacity Management with vRealize Operations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Troubleshooting and Monitoring Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Continuous Improvement Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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