What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Software-Defined Data Center, discusses principles and basics about the SDDC. Besides the technical aspects, it will also highlight the organizational aspects and that the SDDC is a new way of managing and running a data center and therefore also an architectural change. Also, it will describe the implementation journey and what is necessary to take into account besides the technological aspects.
Chapter 2, Identify Automation and Standardization Opportunities, highlights the main principles of automation and standardization. The differences between scripts and workflows are described. Also, it will bring examples how to apply standardization and automation to the data center in order to make the SDDC flexible and agile as possible.
Chapter 3, VMware vSphere: The SDDC Foundation, covers important vSphere functions, which will decrease the amount of customization when it comes to automation. Since virtualization is the base of an SDDC, this chapter will focus on examples and configurations for vSphere. This chapter will discuss advanced vSphere functions and their importance for an SDDC.
Chapter 4, SDDC Design Considerations, explains the main principles of an SDDC design including detailed examples. Highlighted are also what assumptions, constraints and limits are and how they will influence a design. Furthermore, it will show a simple–to-follow approach to translate business challenges in a technical solution and therefore an agile and efficient SDDC design.
Chapter 5, VMware vRealize Automation, introduces vRA (formally known as vCloud Automation Center) and its capabilities. The implementation of the design considerations of the former chapter will be discussed, and it will show other important configuration options, principles, and concepts. Also, it will focus on the creation of so-called blueprints and what is needed to prepare a VM template to be deployed.
Chapter 6, vRealize Orchestrator, touches on what workflows are and how they can be developed in a controlled and clean manner. It will highlight how to integrate those into vRealize Automation to create powerful services for almost any task in the SDDC. In addition, it will discuss what postdeployment third-party integration can be achieved using vRO (for example, IPAM and CMDB integration).
Chapter 7, Service Catalog Creation, brings up the basic service catalog design. Also, it bridges the business case to the service catalog and describes why that is important and how that sync can be achieved. It will explain based on an example how to configure an outcome-focused service catalog in vRealize Automation.
Chapter 8, Network Virtualization using NSX, discusses software-defined networking principles. It highlights NSX basic functions and configurations and why it is a game changer within the SDDC. With NSX, broad data center automation can be fully achieved by gaining maximal flexibility and agility for service deployments. It will also cover the base configuration and integration with SDDC based on practical examples and detailed integration descriptions.
Chapter 9, DevOps Considerations, describes DevOps in general and what changes it brings to IT and the SDDC. It discusses most of the modern technologies to run DevOps including containers and container frameworks such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Furthermore, it describes a DevOps approach to run and manage the SDDC itself using VMware vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps. This will add additional agility and flexibility when it comes to managing and operating the SDDC.
Chapter 10, Capacity Management with vRealize Operations, mentions how important a proper capacity management is in a fully automated data center. It will highlight techniques and principles in regard to successfully plan infrastructure expansion. It provides practical configuration examples for resource planning and predictive capacity maintenance.
Chapter 11, Troubleshooting and Monitoring, explains the monitoring and analytics methods for the SDDC. Since an automated data center might have different challenges in terms of monitoring, it further highlights the differences to static infrastructure and why it is important to have a smart monitoring and analytics approach for the SDDC. It will describe how to limit the impact of issues with smart and predictive troubleshooting and analytics methods, including the use of vRealize Log Insight.
Chapter 12, Continuous Improvement, mentions the importance of continuously working on the services and processes within the SDDC. Once the SDDC is deployed and functions properly it is time to reflect and maybe update the created services. The chapter mentions how important it is to detect possible process flaws or glitches and update those. Furthermore, it summarizes the importance of ITIL in a modern data center and explains that the SDDC is basically the fully automated version of ITIL bringing all its benefits to life without all its drawbacks like the bureaucracy overhead.
