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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Enhance your virtualization skills by mastering storage and network virtualization with automation across different Clouds
Key Features
- Migrate and build your applications in Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cross Cloud components and services
- Gain in-depth configuration insights of VMware Cross Cloud architecture
- Learn to migrate applications from VMware to AWS and IBM Cloud
Book Description
Over the past two decades, VMware vSphere has been known as the most trusted and
reliable virtualization platform. VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture shows you how to design and configure Cross Cloud Architecture by using VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite with various use cases across private, public, and hybrid Cloud. This book takes you through everything from a basic understanding of virtualization to advanced aspects of storage and network virtualization, clustering, automation, and management.
This book will be your guide to designing all aspects of Cloud.
We start with the challenges faced by a traditional data center, define problem statements for you, and then brief you on respective solutions. Moving on, all kinds of virtualization and Cloud offerings from AWS and IBM Soft Layer are introduced and discussed in detail. Then, you'll learn how to design IT infrastructures for new and existing applications with a combination of Cloud Foundation, vRealize Suite, and vSphere enabled with VSAN and NSX. Furthermore, you'll learn how to design and configure high availability, disaster recovery, and apply an appropriate compliance matrix.
Toward the end of the book, you will learn how to calculate the TCO/ROI, along with
the VMware products packaging and licensing in detail.
What you will learn
- Install and configure the Cloud foundation with Cross-Cloud services
- Configure vSphere high availability with the vCenter redundancy setup
- Architect and configure VMware with AWS Cloud
- Deploy VMware components in IBM Soft Layer
- Extend your DR setup with VMware to consume DRaaS
- Design and configure software-defined networking
- Implement compliance regulations to fix violations
Who this book is for
This book is for administrators, Cloud architects and network engineers who want to globalize their infrastructure using VMware and AWS services. An initial setup of workloads and data center is beneficial.
Ajit Pratap Kundan is an infrastructure software consultant with 18 years' experience, having has worked with Novell, Redington, PCS, and Innodata. Currently, he is a technical consultant at VMware, Delhi and provides productive solutions for Federal Government clients, espousing the benefits of hybrid cloud with cross-cloud services. He has a graduate degree in electronics engineering from Pune University with experience in Lotus, Tivoli, PlateSpin, IDM, SUSE Linux, Sentinel, and all of the VMware products. He is an ITIL, CCNA, Lotus, SUSE, Red Hat, and VMware-certified professional.Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 535
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Commissioning Editor: Vijin BorichaAcquisition Editor:Namrata PatilContent Development Editor:Amrita NoronhaTechnical Editor:Nilesh SawakhandeCopy Editor: Safis EditingProject Coordinator:Shweta H BirwatkarProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer:Tejal Daruwale SoniGraphics:Jisha ChirayilProduction Coordinator:Aparna Bhagat
First published: March 2018
Production reference: 1280318
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78728-343-5
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Contributors
About the author
Ajit Pratap Kundan is an infrastructure software consultant with 18 years' experience, having has worked with Novell, Redington, PCS, and Innodata. Currently, he is a technical consultant at VMware, Delhi and provides productive solutions for Federal Government clients, espousing the benefits of hybrid cloud with cross-cloud services. He has a graduate degree in electronics engineering from Pune University with experience in Lotus, Tivoli, PlateSpin, IDM, SUSE Linux, Sentinel, and all of the VMware products. He is an ITIL, CCNA, Lotus, SUSE, Red Hat, and VMware-certified professional.
About the reviewer
Daniel Jonathan Valik is an industry expert in unified communications and collaboration technologies, cloud computing, and Platform as a Service (PaaS). He has worked for large software companies and start-ups in Europe, Asia (APAC), and the US. He is the founder of Hanako Consulting LLC—a strategy, product marketing, and management consulting company. He has strong expertise in areas such as IoT, DevOps, Automation, Microservices, Containerization, Virtualization, Cloud-Native Applications, Artificial Intelligence, and Contact Center Technologies.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
The Freedom with Cross-Cloud Architecture
Scaling your business with Cross-Cloud Architecture
Top IT drivers for integrating public clouds
Cloud challenges and solutions
Challenge 1 – connection and security with full compliance and control
Challenge 2 – managing/integrating across clouds
VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
Secure connectivity across clouds
The backbone of a private cloud
Extending services to public clouds
Multi-cloud/mixed cloud use cases
Cloud solutions supporting business objectives
Modernizing your data center
VMware hybrid clouds
VMware – a partner for every cloud
VMware vCloud Air
AWS hybrid cloud
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions
Solution features
Reference architecture
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions
Conceptual view
Logical view
Deployment view
Summary
Implementing Service Architecture for Cross-Cloud Services
Architecture overview
Seamless integration of software-defined services
Automating IT infrastructure
Policy-based resource containers
Automating manual and repetitive tasks
Unified Management Console
Scalability and performance
Workload domains
Management workload domain
Workload domains
VDI workload domains
Hardware architecture – rack architecture
Rack hardware
Rack sizing
Rack wiring
Storage architecture (software-defined storage)
vSAN storage policies
Network architecture (network virtualization or software-defined network)
Logical network design
VMware Cloud Foundation software design
SDDC Manager
Physical Resource Manager
Logical Resource Manager
LRM Controller
LRM logical resources and LRM services
Hardware Management Service (HMS)
Lifecycle management
vSphere products
NSX
vRealize products
vRealize Operations Manager
vRealize Log Insight
vRealize Automation, VMware vRealize Business, and VMware vRealize Orchestrator
Summary
Transforming a Data Center from Silos to Software-Defined Services
Need for VMware in data center transformation
Business requirements of customers
Interoperability and integration
Logical design
Orchestrator topology choice
Orchestrator server mode choice
vRealize Orchestrator SDDC cluster choice
Integrated architecture design model for private and public clouds
Private cloud integrated architecture design with network and security
Integrated architecture design for virtual machines and applications
Consumption model of network services components
Components and processes for logical switching
vRealize Automation with logical switching consumption overview
Introduction to DevOps and its benefits
Building, deploying, and running services in an innovative way
SDDC object life cycle
vRealize code stream functionality
Automating application release without manual intervention
Advantages of DevOps
Summary
Designing a Mixed Cloud Model with VMware
Core elements of VMware's Cross-Cloud Architecture
Cross-Cloud Services
Choosing suitable applications to move in the cloud
VMware Cloud on AWS
Components/technologies used in VMware-AWS partnerships
Migrating your existing applications to AWS
Application migration phases with supporting tools
Migration assessment
Schema conversion
Conversion of embedded SQL and application code
Data migration
Testing converted code
Data replication
Deployment to AWS and Go-Live
Post-deployment monitoring
Managing AWS with vCenter
Managing administrators on the management portal
Steps for adding an administrator
Steps for removing an administrator
VPCs and subnets management
Steps for creating a VPC and subnets
Steps for deleting a VPC
Security groups management
Steps for creating a security group
Steps for deleting a security group
Environment management in AWS
Steps for creating an environment
Steps for deleting an environment
User permissions management
VM migration to Amazon EC2 with AWS Connector for vCenter
The VM import authorization process
Virtual machine migration process
Backing up the instance
Migrated EC2 instance export process
Troubleshooting migration
Validation of the certificates
VMware Cross-Cloud Model with IBM Cloud
Prerequisites
Components/services used in this architecture
VMware Cloud services architecture on SoftLayer
Physical infrastructure
Physical operational model
Logical operational model
Cluster (compute, storage, and network) architecture
Compute clusters
Management cluster
Edge cluster
Storage cluster
Physical network provided by SoftLayer
Simplicity
Scalability
High bandwidth
Fault-tolerant transport
Physical storage
vSAN
Network File System (NFS)
Storage virtualization
VMware SDS is vSAN
Virtual Machine Disks (VMDK)
Virtual infrastructure
Compute virtualization
Provisioning
Resource scheduling
Availability
Performance
Network virtualization
Network virtualization components
Distributed virtual switches
Network I/O control details
Network virtualization services
Infrastructure management
Compute management
Storage management
Network management
Common services
Identity and access services
DNS
NTP services
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) services
Certificate Authority (CA) services
Cloud management services
Service catalogue
Self-service portal
Infrastructure and process orchestration
Software orchestration
Operational services
Backup and restore
Disaster recovery
Monitoring
Log consolidation and analysis
Patching
Business services
Business management
IT financials
IT benchmarking
Cloud-based approaches for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions
Summary
Implementing Service Redundancy Across All Layers
vSphere virtualization software
VMware vCenter Management Server
vCenter main components
Environment preparation
Certificate for the vSphere Web Client and the Log Browser
Verify that the environment is working properly
Comparison of the vCenter deployment topologies
vSphere HA/redundancy features
vSphere HA
vSphere vMotion details
EVC feature details
vSphere DRS feature details
VMware vSphere Distributed Power Management
Resource pools feature details
vSphere Fault Tolerance
Relevance of vSphere Fault Tolerance for vCenter HA
VM Component Protection (VMCP)
vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC)
vSphere Replication
vCenter Watchdog
vCenter database clustering
Memory reservations
Maximizing memory performance
CPU and memory shares, reservations, and limits
Virtual machine disks
Multiple virtual disks
Virtual disk location
Swap file location
Virtual SCSI HBA type
Virtual NICs
Virtual GPUs
VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache
Guest operating system considerations
VMware Tools
Templates
Templates and multiple sites
Snapshot management
Virtual machine security considerations
Encryption and security certificates
Monitoring and management design practices
Time synchronization
Syslog logging
Performance monitoring
Virtual machine backup and restore
VM-to-VM affinity rules
Backup and recovery - embedded deployment model
Backup and recovery - external deployment model
Migration architecture design
Migration process flow
Migration scheduling
Migration execution
Migration validation
Customer business objectives
Migrated virtual machine framework
Responsibility matrix
Design risks
IaaS migration portal logical design
VMware CMP physical design
VMware Converter Linux migration process
VMware Converter agent
 Network/security changes
Port requirements
Operational readiness for migration
Pre-migration activities
P2V migration options
Hot clone - full outage
Hot clone – post-synchronisation
V2V migration options
V2V conversion
V2V requirements
CMP migration process
Timing estimate (P2V/V2V timing)
Post-migration activities
Summary
Designing Software-Defined Storage Services
Software-defined storage overview
Purpose and applicability to the SDDC solution
Business requirements
Requirements and dependencies
Architecture overview
Conceptual design
Logical design
Virtual SAN (vSAN)
vSAN design workflow
Design parameters/considerations for vSAN
Hardware considerations
Comparing hybrid and all-flash designs
SSDs
Magnetic hard disk drives
I/O controllers
Host memory requirements
Host CPU overhead
Hardware design decisions
Network design
vSAN network port group
Network speed requirements
Type of virtual switch
Jumbo frames
VLANs
Multicast requirements
Networking failover, load balancing, and teaming considerations
Network design decisions
vSAN cluster and datastore design
vSAN disk format
Disk groups
Failures to tolerate policy
Fault domains
Hosts per cluster
Deduplication, compression, and RAID 5/RAID 6 erasure coding
Datastore sizing
Virtual SAN TCO and Sizing Calculator
vSAN cluster and datastore design decisions
vSAN design assumptions
vSAN policy design
Application demand assessment
Policy design decisions
vSAN monitoring design
General monitoring practices
Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in
Virtual SAN Observer
vRealize Operations Manager monitoring
Monitoring design
Scalability limits of vSAN
Product documentation and tools
VMware product documentation
Supporting documentation
Tools
Summary
VMware Cloud Assess, Design, and Deploy Services
VMware Cloud (SDDC) assessment, design, and deploy service solution overview
Virtualization conceptual design
Logical design
Virtualization logical design
Cloud tenant design
Comparison of single tenant and multi-tenant deployments
Single tenant deployment
Multitenant deployment
Cloud automation IaaS design
vSphere infrastructure
Infrastructure source endpoints
vRealize Operations Manager
Application architecture overview
vRealize Infrastructure Navigator
Application architecture overview
Security
Authentication
Communication
Licensing
vRealize Hyperic
Application architecture overview
vRealize Log Insight
Application architecture overview
Deployment architecture
Scalability
Security and authentication
Communication
Integration with different cloud components
vSphere integration
vRealize Operations Manager integration
VMware vRealize Business Manager
Conceptual design
vRealize Business Standard architecture
Data collection service
Data Transformation Service
FactsRepo inventory service
Server
Reference database
External interfaces
vRealize Business Standard appliance role
Supported product integrations
VMware vSphere
VMware vCloud Director
VMware vRealize Business Advanced and Enterprise
VMware vRealize Operations Manager
VMware vRealize Automation
Integrating vRealize Business with public clouds
Solution logical design
Service orientation principle
VMware vRealize Operations Manager
Business scenario
Interoperability requirements
Integration with vRealize Operations Manager
Integration between vRealize Operations Manager and vRealize Automation
Business objective
Integration requirements
Credentials
Firewall rules
Specific configuration with specific objects to be created and consumed
Application release automation with Zero Touch Deployment
Summary
Transforming Your Network Architecture
Assumptions, risks, constraints, and use cases
Design guidelines
Networking and distributed firewalling best practices
Network virtualization
NSX for vSphere components
NSX for vSphere platform
NSX Manager
Distributed firewall
Service composer
NSX for vSphere system requirements
Micro-segmentation conceptual design
Network virtualization logical design
NSX for vSphere component placement
High Availability of NSX for vSphere components
Scalability of NSX for vSphere Components
Firewall logical design
Distributed firewall
Security groups and policies
NSX Manager design
Network virtualization platform management
Consumption layer
NSX for vSphere logging environment
NSX for vSphere management layer
NSX for vSphere deployed components
Distributed firewall logs
Distributed firewall monitoring
Backup and recovery – backing up the NSX Manager data
Backing up the vSphere Distributed Switch
Monitoring and troubleshooting
Flow monitoring
Activity monitoring
vSphere Distributed Switch monitoring
Port mirroring
vSphere Distributed Switch alerts
vSphere Distributed Switch network health check
SNMP
NetFlow/Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX)
Performance and scalability
Scalability considerations
VXLAN
MTU on the transport network
NSX Controller
IGMP usage
Hybrid mode
Brownfield migration
Migration inside the same hardware infrastructure
Migration to a new hardware infrastructure
NSX for vSphere port and protocol requirements
Reference documents
Summary
Dealing with Data Sovereignty
Security
Securing ESXi hosts
Lockdown mode
Securing vCenter Server
Encryption and security certificates
Virtual network security considerations
Network firewalls and vCenter Server
Securing virtual machines with vLANs
Securing virtual switch ports
Securing iSCSI storage connectivity
Securing NFS storage connectivity
Virtual machine security considerations
Security design decisions
Micro-segmentation – how to define security on east-west traffic
PAN security – integrating NSX with Palo Alto
Application modeling for micro-segmentation – protecting your apps from east-west traffic in a data center
VMware vRealize Configuration Manager architecture design
Backup and restore
General use cases of customers
vRealize Configuration Manager logical architecture overview
VCM platform
Summary
Designing Effective Compliance Regulations to Fix Violations
Best practices to follow for compliance regulations
Data collection
Data analysis
Report generation and data integration
Standard use cases
Network virtualization
NSX Edge Gateway Firewall and Trust Groups
VMware vCloud Hybrid Manager
Phase 1 – Planning
Phase 2 – Kickoff
Phase 3 – Solution overview
Phase 4 – Assess
Phase 5 – Design
Conceptual design
Logical design
VMware vRealize Configuration Manager platform
vRealize Configuration Manager guest OS compliance
Summary
Lower TCO and Greater ROI with Maximum Agility
Operational readiness for the cloud
Phase 1 – Cost Center
Phase 2 – Service Provider
Phase 3 – Business Partner
Contrasting approaches to building a private cloud
VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure management
A traditional 3-tier architecture-based private cloud
Cost comparison methodology and approach
Hardware and software cost analysis
Cost comparison results - upfront costs for hardware, software, and support
Comparing the key technical capabilities and business benefits
Integrated provisioning and life-cycle management
Support experience
Comparison of the key technical and business value attributes
OpEx costs savings analysis
Virtualization First Policy
Summary
VMware Pricing and Licensing for a Cross-Cloud Model
Transforming a data center with Cloud Foundation
VMware pricing and licensing in AWS Cloud
Summary
The Economics of Cross-Cloud Services
Total cost of ownership with cost categories
Summary
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Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is the most trusted platform, not only for new applications, but also for existing legacy applications. This book will introduce you to tried and tested cloud design and deployment methodologies to help you achieve your business objectives and overcome all of the challenges faced by traditional data centers. Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite will help you to set up and integrate private clouds with public clouds such as AWS and IBM Soft Layer.
Who this book is for
This book is intended for those planning, designing, and implementing the virtualization components of the SDDC foundational infrastructure. The intended audience is core technical teams, including those responsible for product development, servers, storage, networking, security, and backup and recovery. It is assumed that the reader has knowledge of and familiarity with virtualization concepts and related topics (including storage and networking).
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Freedom with Cross-Cloud Architecture, introduces different types of clouds, where we will learn about all of the cloud benefits that can help you to overcome traditional or multi-cloud challenges with Cross Cloud Architecture.
Chapter 2, Implementing Service Architecture for Cross-Cloud Services, makes use of VMware Cloud Foundation deployment to achieve a unified software-defined data center (SDDC) platform for the hybrid cloud, that is based on VMware compute, storage, and network virtualization, a natively integrated software stack that can be used on-premises for private cloud deployment or run as a service from the public cloud with consistent, simple operations by integrating it with VMware vRealize Suite, VMware Horizon, and VMware Integrated OpenStack to deliver a comprehensive SDDC platform.
Chapter 3, Transforming a Data Center from Silos to Software-Defined Services, explains how to host applications in the cloud world to provide administrators with flexibility and best control along with business values from Cross Cloud Architecture.
Chapter 4, Designing a Mixed Cloud Model with VMware, combines a best-in-class private cloud with leading public clouds, all powered by the ever-reliable and most flexible hybrid cloud platform offered by VMware.
Chapter 5, Implementing Service Redundancy Across All Layers, talks about different vCenter Server deployment topologies with redundant operations, and all of the High availability functionalities of vSphere, such as vMotion, and different Fault Tolerance options comparing their strengths and weaknesses.
Chapter 6, Designing Software-Defined Storage Services, discusses how to design and scale a software defined storage service and deep dives into reference deployment scenarios of VMware vSAN.
Chapter 7, VMware Cloud Assess, Design, and Deploy Service, discusses the technical analysis of all VMware Cloud components (including their design and configuration) in detail and also helps you to design correctly with best practices to follow for specific use cases and the orchestration of all cloud components.
Chapter 8, Transforming Your Network Architecture, provides examples of creating, provisioning, and managing networks in a software-defined way using the underlying physical network as a simple packet‐forwarding backplane, and also explains how to migrate from legacy network architectures to new network virtualization techniques.
Chapter 9, Dealing with Data Sovereignty, explains sovereignty compliance strategies and how to use an encryption solution to secure data at all stages of the cloud journey. This chapter also shows you how to ensure that data backup and secondary data centers for data recovery/disaster recovery purposes remain local.
Chapter 10, Designing Effective Compliance Regulations to Fix Violations, explains design compliance regulations for multiple purposes by aligning line of business divisions with the best technology, such as VMware, to be compliant in this versatile market. Security and compliance must be a shared responsibility between IT and its cloud service provider.
Chapter 11, Lower TCO and Greater ROI with Maximum Agility, explains that, in order to achieve the goal of cloud, we need to extend virtualization techniques across the entire data center to lower the capital and operational expenditure, achieving maximum ROI.
Chapter 12, VMware Pricing and Licensing for a Cross-Cloud Model, discusses VMware Cloud Foundation pricing and licensing as well as other VMware Cloud component licensing models.
Chapter 13, The Economics of Cross-Cloud Services, explains a cost analysis of different cost categories and compares competitive existing solutions on the market.
To get the most out of this book
This book is intended for administrators with different levels of server, storage, and networking experience:
All administrators can learn network design and storage scaling to manage and monitor hosts in the vSphere environment.
Experienced VMware administrators can learn about private/hybrid cloud design and deployment in different scenarios. They can customize their designs as per customer requirements.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/VMwareCrossCloudArchitecture_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Open Services.msc from the run command."
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "The syslog service can be configured on ESXi using host profiles, the VMware vSphere command line interface, or the Advanced Configuration options in the vSphere Web Client"
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: Email [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at [email protected].
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The Freedom with Cross-Cloud Architecture
This chapter briefs you on cloud service architectures. The chapter includes the following sections:
Cloud benefits and challenges
VMware solutions to overcome different cloud challenges
VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
Overview of private, public, and hybrid clouds
Overview of vCloud Air, AWS, and the IBM Cloud
Readers will be able to design elastic IT infra capabilities and set up a basic application hosting and DevOps environment with VMware components after going through this book. You will be able to install and configure all the building blocks to get the benefits of VMware SDDC components in an on-premises private cloud, a public cloud such as IBM or AWS, or a mix of both—a hybrid cloud.
Scaling your business with Cross-Cloud Architecture
Digital transformation is taking place in each and every market segment, including financial services, healthcare, retail, education, and government. The world is being redefined by software and data, creating new priorities for every business, and new imperatives for every IT organization. IT has to be agile enough to drive growth and extend the capabilities and services that they deliver to lines of business (LOBs). IT organizations have to transform their legacy setup and extend their IT environments to public clouds to boost innovation, agility, and cost savings.
IT is playing a key role in business growth. IT organizations work as strategic partners, and business leaders are seeking better alignment with their technical teams as they evaluate go-to-market strategies and important decisions, such as mergers and acquisitions.
Organizations expect their technical teams to support them with a modern IT environment that helps them accelerate innovation and agility, so they can compete with new services and applications that will help them to grow their business rapidly. IT organizations are expected to help keep costs in line. To address these expectations, IT teams are embracing public cloud solutions.
Top IT drivers for integrating public clouds
IT leaders cite three primary drivers for integrating public clouds:
Disruptive approach
: In today's disrupted, accelerated, app-centric marketplace, speeding up time-to-market is critical; LOBs and developers see public clouds as the fastest option for meeting their IT platform requirements.
CapEx pressures
: IT teams are under considerable pressure to take advantage of potential cost savings. They are replacing on-premises infrastructures with public cloud-based hosting models or services, to increase capacity while reducing operational efforts and costs. According to a Gartner research director,
"Customers are saving 14 percent of their budgets because of public cloud adoption, which subsequently grow public cloud businesses
.
"
A cloud-first strategy
: Most senior leadership mandates a cloud-first strategy to drive reduced time to value by leveraging shared infrastructure and paying only for the resources consumed. Many enterprises are already using hybrid clouds; some mix of private and public clouds, for greater flexibility and resilience.
Businesses are strongly embracing the cloud for every challenge. Enterprises recognize the value of public cloud flexibility and agility, but still must address key challenges to integrate hybrid cloud solutions into their operations.
Cloud challenges and solutions
We have cloud options, such as a private cloud, different service provider options, and large public clouds. The best solution is possible without adding cost and complexity. The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture helps you to choose the cloud that fulfills your business objective.
Challenge 1 – connection and security with full compliance and control
We have to manage incompatibility between different cloud models or service providers, otherwise it will create new silos and create overhead. You must avoid these silos and get a unified console to fulfill the requirements of the business objective. IT organizations are looking for ways to take advantage of the flexibility and agility that various clouds offer, even though many mission-critical and data-sensitive apps are currently running on-premises. We need to take a close look at how we can migrate applications running on-premises or in a private cloud to the public cloud, without adding any cost to their existing investments. We have to utilize the application design, SDLC processes, and maintain security and compliance best practices.
Solution: VMware overcomes this issue by extending a network to public clouds through a network virtualization technique. It interacts with public clouds and services in a secure manner by applying all governance regulatory compliance. You can maintain all on-premises network policies, even extending your applications across multiple clouds. You have all the freedom to host/publish your applications anywhere and anytime with end-to-end control and compliance.
Challenge 2 – managing/integrating across clouds
We want to host our applications and manage resources in various clouds. As organizations invest in multiple clouds, they are also creating more complex, siloed environments that don't have common management tools or enterprise-class security across their cloud infrastructure. They may even build new teams to own and operate these different silos, reducing efficiency and driving up costs. Customers are looking for a solution that can help them to manage mixed clouds from a single console.
Solution: VMware will give you the holistic view from a single console of the entire infrastructure, and also management tools to monitor and manage resources, applications, and operations across different clouds. This approach prevents you from experiencing cloud vendor lock-in, monitoring operations, and managing specific service-level agreements (SLAs). You have holistic management and your end users can connect to public clouds with confidence. A single unified management layer with automated processes delivers a fully customized cloud management platform, which gears up service delivery, enhances operations, and delivers end-user choice with control and compliance, across heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments.
VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture provides freedom for end users and control from a service provider perspective, helping a customer to make hybrid cloud decisions, when running, managing, connecting, and securing all of their applications across any cloud in a common operating environment.
The Cross-Cloud Architecture enables uniform deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications running on-premises and off, irrespective of the underlying cloud or hypervisor.
The following architecture consists of SDDC-based VMware Cloud Foundation with a hyper-converged software solution, a set of VMware Cross-Cloud Services, and the vRealize cloud management platform:
Secure connectivity across clouds
Now the question is, how can we manage and monitor resources across mixed clouds with seamless control and compliant connectivity? The answer is VMware Cross-Cloud Services, which is a set of services that will give users a common operating platform to monitor, manage, govern, and secure applications running across private and public clouds. VMware Cross-Cloud Services will provide visibility of cloud resource consumption and map it to its costs, provide dynamic on-demand networks and security policies, and automate the process of deployment (Green Field or Brown Field deployments) and migration of applications and data (new or legacy) across both VMware-based and heterogeneous clouds.
The following figure depicts multi-cloud environment operations:
A single self service provisioning portal is good enough to monitor operations and manage resources of all of the customer's workloads/applications across private and public clouds.
The different customer LOBs will be able to get their specific data on demand in their customized format at any time, such as costing of specific apps or managing certain SLAs to meet business objectives.
Our goal is to provide all services across any cloud so users can consume these services without having any concern or doubts in mind.
We can achieve this by extending the same network virtualization concept that is already used in a customer's private clouds to a public cloud. Customers want to enable uniform and encrypted logical networks across all clouds, wherever their applications get hosted.
Cross-Cloud services will give unified cloud-network management, while a customer's LOBs can use public clouds as per their business demand.
Customers will get tools to secure their data and applications, as well as control their costs, by enabling developers and the business to innovate across any cloud infrastructure that fits their requirements.
The backbone of a private cloud
Customers used to say that their LOBs wanted IT resources on demand, as per their business objective. Their LOBs don't want to be dependent on the IT team, and want to consume IT services as per their need without any constraint on time and location. They want to provision apps to their end users on any device, at any time, and from any location. To achieve this, they need agile IT infrastructure that can provision them IT resources on demand from anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
For example, an Oracle database needs to be 100% available 24*7*365 days. Customers have to deliver more applications with the same resources without exceeding its TCO and at the same time, maintain the end user's demands by fulfilling all compliance parameters.
To build a robust private cloud while considering all the preceding parameters, we have to consider the following three mechanisms, which will provide customers with a resilient and flexible platform to run their businesses:
Virtualize all components of IT
: Customers already know the benefits of compute virtualization. VMware can extend the same concept to storage and network for optimal utilization of hardware, based on the SDDC concept.
Automate IT
: Virtualizing every component will drastically reduce your CapEx but you need to automate the process to reduce the Opex cost. A self service provisioning portal will help you to provision infrastructure as a service to different LOBs and this will reduce the dependency of LOBs on the IT team. It will speed up IT service delivery, which enables users to meet time to market demand and admin to monitor and manage for these services.
Support heterogenous environment
: Today's digital business world demands collaboration between LOBs, developers, IT Infra teams, and support for digital business transformation and innovation. VMware has a private cloud solution with open APIs, to use OpenStack (VMware Integrated OpenStack APIs) and developers can reap the benefits of containers.
We can build a private cloud integrated with all the required hardware components in a single/multiple engineered box by using the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) concept (http://view.ceros.com/vm-ware/vmware-hci/p/1). It has seamless, integrated, unified management, virtualized storage, network, and compute. Customers can build HCI solutions with VMware hyper-converged software (vSphere and vSAN) on any x86 (Intel/AMD processors) server or, they can buy a fully integrated solution with all the required hardware and software from any VMware partner, such as DELL, HP, Cisco, Fijitshu, Hitachi, Nutanix, Lenovo, and so on.
VMware Cloud Foundation plus the hyper-converged concept gives you SDDC in a box, which simplifies the installation, update, and software life cycle management of a private cloud, as well as reducing Opex. It brings together compute, storage, and network virtualization, enabling customers to effectively leverage virtualization technologies for efficiency, availability, performance, and scale.
It is also integrated with the vRealize cloud management platform and VMware SDDC Manager software, which helps customers to automate the deployment, configuration, and day-to-day management of a cloud across different environments. Developers get more options to innovate in the private cloud infrastructure and administrators get a single operating platform to manage private and hybrid clouds.
Extending services to public clouds
Customers can extend their VMware private clouds smoothly to vSphere-based public clouds, such as the VMware vCloud Air public cloud service, in two ways:
The following diagram explains the common operating service platform:
The customer wants an instant way to build a disaster recovery solution or set up a test and dev environment. vCloud Air (also available from the vCloud Air Network of cloud providers) acts as a self-service virtual machine (VM) vending machine. It lowers the cost per application and utilizes existing investments with 100% compatibility, common management tools, and zero rewrites. It will also help customers with seamless app portability, which reduces time, risk, and cost. The following figure depicts minimizing risk while reducing cost and time to market:
Sometimes, customers want to build a private cloud in a public cloud environment and leverage the complete VMware SDDC stack, including full management and control.
The VMware Cloud Foundation, with leading cloud service providers (IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and vCloud Air), can deliver the full SDDC stack in a managed hybrid-cloud environment as-a-service (EaaS) option.
These options help customers with more choice and flexibility in how they build, run, and manage a private cloud and move, or extend to a public cloud. Customers can leverage their investment in technologies and in their skill sets, so they can deploy any, or all of these options using existing skills, processes, and tools.
Multi-cloud/mixed cloud use cases
A combination of public cloud services with a private cloud provides you the best possible robust and elastic cloud strategy. You get all the freedom and flexibility with no cloud vendor lock-in. You can retrieve more values with continuous innovation. VMware has transformed data centers, with freedom and control over hardware, and now VMware will provide you the same freedom and control over cloud options.
The following image shows that any app can be accessed any time, on any device in the VMware Cross-Cloud Services model:
Cloud solutions supporting business objectives
The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture and Cross-Cloud Services give customers all the options to set up their IT infra, as per their business model in different locations. It will give the customers all kinds of private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions to optimize their IT cost, as well as align with their specific business objectives.
Modernizing your data center
Customers have to adopt new applications to align with the always-changing business requirements, and they can only achieve this by leveraging cloud-native technologies available on different platforms/clouds.
Customers can avoid operational issues by integrating these new applications with existing IT operations. They can also move these existing applications to on-premises or public clouds. These applications with cloud services can be redesigned/developed to adopt new IT models. VMware solutions help customers benefit from public clouds by migrating existing applications to the public cloud.
The Cross-Cloud Architecture helps customers to build, run, connect, and secure apps across any cloud, and work in a common operating platform. Customers can build common platforms for future applications and digital business roadmaps, and avoid the bottlenecks of different cloud silos.
Customers will get more choices and interoperability with VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture and Cross-Cloud Services, in how to build, run, and manage their applications in various kinds of cloud models from different vendors. Customers have the full freedom to deploy a solution based on an SDDC-based private cloud to a VMware hybrid cloud, whichever fits with their strategy to achieve their specific business goals.
VMware hybrid clouds
VMware hybrid clouds enable customers to run their existing legacy applications and new cloud-ready applications from a common platform and get the best of both worlds. Customers can scale, consolidate, and migrate infrastructure on demand by taking advantage of existing tools, processes, and skill sets. They can extend their on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud in a different location, or can set up disaster recovery sites in different regions. It will help in data center consolidation and application migration by improving dynamic capacity capabilities for new application development.
It supports applications by providing business agility, resilience, scalability, and any choice of public cloud provider, such as VMware vCloud Air and vCloud Air network partners or, IBM Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) by extending their on-premises data centers. IT teams can run any application anywhere, with complete application portability thanks to the VMware Hybrid Cloud. They can maintain operational consistency by employing a common management experience and networking constructs to maximize use of existing skill sets and tools.
Organizations seeking to reduce CapEx investment can replace on-premises data center infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation, a complete SDDC infrastructure platform, delivered as a service through VMware vCloudAir, VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM, and VMware Cloud on AWS. They can also take advantage of global scale and reach, with a presence in over 100 countries, vCloud Air, and 4,000+ vCloud Air network partners, including IBM and AWS.
Organizations are also exploring advanced management and automation for cloud brokering and integrating DevOps practices across multiple clouds. As needs change, they need an easy exit strategy for moving applications and virtual machines from any public cloud at any point, without vendor lock-in. VMware provides different options to customers to connect securely and manage multiple clouds with on-premises solutions or SaaS-based services.
IT organizations can take advantage of VMware's cloud management platform (VMware vRealize Suite) with advanced networking capabilities from VMware NSX together to manage different private and public clouds.
Customers can build and run applications, migrate them across multiple clouds, securely connect all clouds, and manage all workloads across networks. Advanced operations management features help to get a single unified console of the health, performance, and capacity management of virtual machines across clouds plus policy-based governance. For organizations in heavily regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare, VMware helps ensure compliance by monitoring the status of workloads, detecting drift, and automating remediation.
With cost an ever-growing issue, IT teams can also leverage VMware solutions to see and control the cost of cloud services.
VMware will help IT teams to manage any application or workload running on any cloud using Cross-Cloud Services (SaaS-based management and network services).
These planned service offerings include the on-boarding of existing cloud services and users, cloud service costing and reporting, centralized identity, access and operations management, networking, micro-segmentation, and encryption.
VMware – a partner for every cloud
It's a multi-cloud world, but it takes an integrated approach for organizations to achieve their digital transformation goals. Teaming up with VMware and standardizing on SDDC solutions that support both private and public clouds increases enterprise flexibility, security, and choice while rapidly reducing cost and risk.
Over the last two decades, VMware has been the leader in virtualization, and has held the top spot in Gartner's Magic/Leaders Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure for more then seven consecutive years. VMware is positioned furthest in capability to execute and future roadmap vision in Gartner's latest report.
Customers can build a private cloud without any risk, which can extend seamlessly to compatible public clouds and run any application on any cloud.
We have to be very cautious when choosing a hybrid cloud provider compared to private or public cloud solutions. We have additional challenges such as integration, interoperability, and common operating environments in deciding a hybrid cloud provider over a public or private cloud.
We choose a private or public cloud based on customer applications and business objectives. We have to know the feasibility of applications while considering a hybrid cloud solution.
We are going to make use of a hybrid cloud for extending resources/services such as DR services from a private data center to a public cloud. We try to maintain uniform security, SLAs, and management as much as possible, so it is close to a private cloud, and achieve a common operating environment.
VMware vCloud Air
VMware's vSphere is one of the first tried and tested cloud operating platforms. vSphere hypervisor is rock solid in its performance and reliability to become a first choice for most of the cloud providers. VMware vCloud Air is a vendor agnostic public cloud platform running Microsoft, Linux, and vSphere supported operating systems and applications as per customer choice. It provides a consistent and certified platform suited to most operating systems, along with most of the applications running on x86 (32–64 bit) platforms (Intel/AMD). VMware uses the same vCloud software for both the private and public cloud deployments, along with all required APIs to keep seamless integration and management of resources.
VMware also helps in software defined networking (SDN) concepts and brings that exposure to the hybrid cloud through NSX and virtualizing both network and security components to achieve micro-segmentation.
Customers can get a hybrid cloud from VMware vCloud Air, as well as from vCloud Air partners who are certified to run VMware's vCloud Air services from different regions. Customers can optimize cost with various options to leverage VMware vCloud Air services.
AWS hybrid cloud
AWS doesn't have the privilege of providing a hybrid cloud service as compared to the other cloud providers. AWS helps customers run/host applications in their public cloud data center and utilize AWS in a hybrid environment to run their DR or extended services.
AWS is more focused on public cloud offerings and does not offer its cloud management software offsite to achieve common operating environments for both worlds. AWS leverages a direct connect service that bridges the customer's data center with a virtual private cloud (VPC) resource to get a hybrid solution. AWS has the best of the best resources and expertise to manage the hosted side of a hybrid cloud, but they don't have a roadmap for on-premises private clouds, although they are one of the best public cloud providers. Direct connect is a specific connection from a VMware or Microsoft private cloud, but is not a universal connector to integrate with other cloud providers.
The AWS GovCloud program is a hybrid cloud offering that uses AWS for on-site private clouds for the US government. AWS doesn't have this option for private customers.
AWS customers need a solution for private cloud management, and have a dependency on third-party offerings which increases Opex.
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions help customers to improve the cost per application, reduce Opex, and have the agility to extend applications/services to the IBM Cloud. You can benefit from both cloud models by expanding or migrating workloads/services using secure and seamless networking capabilities that work in heterogeneous environments, powered by VMware NSX. IBM Bluemix bare metal servers on IBM Cloud will provide you with all these services by maintaining full control and compliance.
IBM Cloud gives access to the VMware solution by managing resources as you are doing your data center. You can consume VMware software based on a pay-as-you-use model. IBM Cloud for VMware can help you with uniform management and regulatory governance for your hybrid cloud setup with a common networking and security operating model.
Solution features
The features listed are as follows:
Uniform management
: Self service provisioning portal, seamless access, and monitors and manages a hybrid cloud with the VMware tools and skill sets you already have
Pay-as-you-go-model
: Cost-effective CPU-based pricing of VMware software and pricing is per resource consumption
Global data centers
: IBM Cloud data centers have a footprint across North America, Europe, and Asia so you can get cloud resources in most of the places you require them
Network virtualization
: IBM Cloud data centers are built with robust networking infrastructure and virtualization software having the best bandwidth pipe and connectivity, which enables your applications to have the highest speed and reliability
Reference architecture
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is based on Cloud Foundation technology and it helps with deployment, migration, and management of these SDDC components in the IBM public cloud. You can partially deploy SDDC now to the IBM Cloud in an automated way rather than doing it manually. Deployment and configuration, which used to take several weeks, can be possible within a few hours.
This easy and simple deployment helps you to focus on other innovative works rather than putting your man hours and money into building your own environment. As you are able to create different setups on demand within a few hours, you have options to build both hybrid cloud solutions, expanding your private cloud and the IBM public cloud, as well as cloud-native solutions in the IBM public cloud. You will get disaster recovery or high-availability capabilities for your applications with the multi-cloud deployment model. The following image shows the versatile Hybrid Cloud platform:
The VMware components in IBM Cloudware are:
VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud
The Cloud Foundation will automate your VMware software deployment. The VMware SDDC solution combines IBM Bluemix infrastructure with vSphere, .Virtual SAN, NSX, and SDDC Manager for a seamless hybrid cloud setup. You are able to use the same management tool to manage this setup without re-investing in resources or skill set.
VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud
vCenter Server on IBM Cloud helps you in on-demand, automated deployments with integrated backup, which combines IBM Bluemix bare metal servers with vSphere and vCenter solution to create, deploy, and manage your virtual machines with scale up or scale out architecture as per customer requirements.
IBM Bluemix Infrastructure with VMware software
You can optimize, expand or migrate your virtual machines to high-performance, global cloud resources. You can customize your deployment in a cloud infrastructure to extend your footprint around the world on demand, and manage it all with a management control that you are already familiar with.
Cloud Professional Services
The Cloud Professional Services team helps you to plan, design, deploy, and configure VMware solutions on bare metal servers. They will help with integration, virtual machine migration, or application portability.
IBM Cloud's data centers have a presence across North America, Europe, and Asia, which helps you to scale globally and also retain complete control and automation of your operations, both on-premises and in the public cloud.
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions
We will discuss high-level architecture of cloud deployment. The basic factors to start with cloud architecture and its deployment strategy are as follows:
Cloud interfaces and formats must follow industry standards
Information is needed to perform specific functions
End-to-end monitoring of all resource usage by both the cloud consumer and provider
Guarantee of reliability, availability, security, and performance
Availability should be guaranteed at each and every layer
Compliant identity separation to avoid leakage of data to other customers
Full visibility and control
Enhance productivity and rapid growth with transformation of IT setup
Guaranteed data protection with full compliance and regulations
Minimize manual operations with automated operations
Conceptual view
The conceptual view has three key roles—the Service Provider, Consumer, and the Cloud Broker, as depicted here:
The cloud provider role is the most critical among all three of them. We can't define scale for a cloud infrastructure and its specific requirements easily. You have to plan and design cloud deployment and consider all SLAs while maintaining all regulatory governance and compliance.
Cloud providers manage the costs of all factors including the cost of space, building, cooling, utilities, and rack spaces. They have to define TCO/ROI per application for specific periods of time.
Logical view
Access layers comprise two functionalities: interfaces and network, as shown here. The cloud has different interfaces to interact with the underlying services and its management capabilities. The access layer has end-user facing interfaces along with operator defined capabilities. The following figure shows natively stack with compute, storage and network pools:
You can get the management capabilities for all types of services from a common cloud management layer. You get a holistic view and end-to-end visibility of the infrastructure through a unified management layer. The management layer is capable of supporting build time and runtime services.
Deployment view
Cloud deployment depends on the scale of deployment and the type of services. Private cloud implementations are very different compared to large scale public cloud infrastructures that support hundreds of customers.
Most public cloud deployments are big in scale and need to design mission critical infrastructure to achieve performance, availability, security, flexibility, and SLA goals.
Summary
We have learnt about VMware SDDC technology-based cloud offerings in this chapter. SDDC systems lower costs while dramatically improving ease of use. Companies can deploy on-premises, private cloud infrastructure that has the ease of use and scalability of a public cloud, with guaranteed quality of service. Cross-Cloud solutions help you to deliver the only unified SDDC platform for the hybrid cloud (AWS, IBM, and vCloud Air), with customized and well-designed on-premises cloud service deployment options.
Through an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation, companies can be assured that their data center infrastructure can be easily consumed, managed, upgraded, and enhanced to provide the best private cloud along with public cloud offerings, such as AWS and IBM, at the lowest cost. Using a modular, scale-out approach means infrastructure is added in hours, not days, and businesses can be assured that infrastructure scales linearly without any added complexity.
Choice is key: any app on any cloud at any time. Customers need a choice of where to run workloads. We shouldn't be forced into a single public cloud provider. We can choose the public cloud (such as AWS, IBM, vCloud Air, across the world) and not end up with applications trapped somewhere.
This book helps you understand why bimodal IT isn't necessarily the best path forward for the long term. We get the outcomes promised by bimodal IT without worrying about the inefficiencies that this model can introduce. Our users are far ahead of where they were a few years ago. Our infrastructure environment must reflect this fact by enabling user self service and automation, both of which are supported in an enterprise cloud scenario.
In the next chapter, we will discuss cloud services architecture and its different components, such as workload domains, racks, storage, networks, and VMware Cloud Foundation Software Design in detail.
Implementing Service Architecture for Cross-Cloud Services
This chapter will brief you on VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment to get a unified software-defined data center (SDDC) platform for the hybrid cloud. Based on VMware compute, storage, and network virtualization, this deployment delivers a natively integrated software stack that can be used on-premises for private cloud deployment, or run as a service from the public cloud with consistent and simple operations. It can be further integrated with VMware vRealize Suite, VMware Horizon, and VMware Integrated OpenStack to deliver a comprehensive SDDC platform.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Architecture overview
Workload domain logical architecture
Rack architecture
Storage architecture
Network architecture
VMware Cloud Foundation software design
Architecture overview
VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform for the private and public cloud. Cloud Foundation brings together compute, storage, and network virtualization into a closely integrated stack that can be deployed on-premises or run as a service from the public cloud.
The service architecture focuses on deploying it in an on-premises configuration and also as an extension to the public cloud. The Cloud Foundation architecture is shown in the following figure:
Cloud Foundation adds several unique capabilities in addition to the core features and capabilities provided by vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and cloud management components.
Seamless integration of software-defined services
Cloud Foundation helps you to get a tightly integrated software-defined data center solution comprising of the compute, storage, and network virtualization components such as VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX, respectively, in addition to the SDDC Manager for lifecycle management automation to bring up the hardware at the initial stage. Customers have various options to upgrade individual components to higher editions or deploy and use their existing licenses.
Automating IT infrastructure
Cloud Foundation automates the installation of the entire VMware software components as the rack is installed and powered-on, and the networking is enabled. SDDC Manager leverages its knowledge of the hardware details and user-provided configuration details (such as DNS, IP address pool, and so on) to initialize the rack. This way, it saves a lot of time and prevents manual errors and repeated tasks. These activities include provisioning of workloads, automated provisioning of networks, allocation of resources based on service needs, and provisioning of end points. It helps the customer start production and the provisioning of resources for end users.
Policy-based resource containers
You can create logical entities, such as workload domains, for creating resource pools across compute, storage, and networking components. A workload domain is a customized policy-based logical entity with defined availability and performance parameters with compute, storage, and network in a single, consumable entity. You will get the required capacity with defined policies for performance, availability, and security with each logical entity. As an example, it is possible to create one logical entity for test workloads that require balanced performance and low availability, while for production workloads, which need high availability and high performance, a different entity will be defined.
SDDC Manager provides automation through its deployment workflow to map the workload domain policies into the underlying pool of hardware resources (compute, storage, and network). These logical entities (workload domains) help you follow the best practices to achieve customer operational objectives.
A logical entity (workload domain) can be customized with in definite time duration as part of the customer's time bound business objective.
Automating manual and repetitive tasks
Data center component upgrades and patch management are typically manual and repetitive tasks that are prone to configuration and implementation errors. Validation testing and dependency checking of software and hardware firmware maintains interoperability among components when one component is patched or upgraded and requires extensive testing and downtime. Customers take the difficult decision to deploy new patches before they are fully tested or defer new patches, which slows down the roll-out of new features, security, and bug fixes. Both situations increase risks for the customers.
SDDC Manager automates upgrades and patch management for the SDDC software components, which improves reliability and consistency of the IT infrastructure.
Lifecycle management is designed to be non-disruptive and helps the customer to maximize uptime for their IT services.
