New excerpt from VMware: Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN): Administrator’s Guide to VMware Virtual SAN. This book will introduce you to the software-defined data center through an in-depth look at the storage elements involved. The first chapter is free, and the book itself is available for purchase as both an ebook and a hard copy. For an administrator looking to get started on a software-defined future, this book is downright essential.
Software-Defined Datacenter
VMworld, the VMware annual conferencing event, introduced VMware’s vision for the software-defined datacenter (SDDC) in 2012. The SDDC is VMware’s architecture for the public and private clouds where all pillars of the datacenter—compute, storage, and networking (and the associated services)—are virtualized. Virtualizing datacenter components enables the IT team to be more flexible. If you lower the operational complexity and cost while increasing availability and agility, you will ultimately lower the time to market for new services.
To achieve all of that, virtualization of components by itself is not sufficient. The platform used must be capable of being installed and configured in a fully automated fashion. More importantly, the platform should enable you to manage and monitor your infrastructure in a smart and less operationally intense manner. That is what the SDDC is all about! Raghu Raghuram (VMware senior vice president) captured it in a single sentence: The essence of the software-defined datacenter is “abstract, pool, and automate.”
Abstraction, pooling, and automation are all achieved by introducing an additional layer on top of the physical resources. This layer is usually referred to as a virtualization layer. Everyone reading this book is probably familiar with the leading product for compute virtualization, VMware vSphere. Fewer people are probably familiar with network virtualization, sometimes referred to as software-defined network (SDN) solutions. VMware offers a solution named NSX that is based on the solution built by the acquired company Nicira. NSX does for networking what vSphere does for compute. These layers do not just virtualize the physical resources but also allow you to pool them and provide you with an application programming interface (API) that enables you to automate all operational aspects.
