Reference Architecture for building a VMware Software–Defined Datacenter

The latest in our series of reference architectures is now available. This is an update to the previous version which brings in additional products and covers the vCloud Suite 5.8 release.

This reference architecture describes an implementation of a software-defined data center (SDDC) using VMware vCloud® Suite Enterprise 5.8, VMware NSX™ for vSphere® 6.1, VMware IT Business Management Suite™ Standard Edition 1.1, and VMware vCenter™ Log Insight™ 2.0 to create an SDDC. This SDDC implementation is based on real-world scenarios, user workloads, and infrastructure system configurations. The configuration uses industry-standard servers, IP-based storage, and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking to support a scalable and redundant architecture.

The goal with this release is to showcase product interoperability within the vCloud Suite in addition to some of our other products which make up our SDDC vision. However this reference architecture does not fully detail design decisions including requirements, risks, constraints & assumptions. The reasoning for this is that the goal was to show one simple way our product stack can easily and quickly be setup in a secure and highly available manner allowing end users to start deploying virtual machines.

Download – Creating a VMware Software-Defined Datacenter Reference Architecture
Please leave any feedback you have, what you’d like to see in a future revision, etc., in this Community Thread.

Products used in the Reference Architecture for building a VMware Software–Defined Datacenter:

Product	Version	Description
vCloud Suite Enterprise	5.8	Comprehensive suite of products used to deliver the SDDC. In this architecture, users leverage the following components of vCloud Suite Enterprise 5.8: VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition™ 5.5 Update 2, vCloud Automation Center 6.1, vCloud Automation Center Application Services 6.1, vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.2.1, VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.8, and vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.3.
VMware vCenter Server™	5.5 U2	Central platform for managing and configuring the ESXi hypervisor. VMware vSphere Web Client is the centralized point of administration for compute clusters and all networking services provided by NSX for vSphere.
NSX for vSphere	6.1	NSX for vSphere exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, virtual private network (VPN), QoS, monitoring, and security.
IT Business Management	1.1	IT Business Management provides transparency into costs of cloud environments and IT services. Infrastructure teams can understand the costs of supplying private and public cloud environments, while CIOs and IT executives can understand the costs of supplying IT services.
vCenter Log Insight	2.0	Real-time log management and log analysis with machine learning–based intelligent grouping, high-performance search, and better troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.