LEARNING MADE EASY
VMware Special Edition
Software-Defined
Infrastructure
Maximize
current investments
Deliver operational
consistency
Accelerate business
impact
Tracie Stamm
David Zolnier
With digital transformation accelerating To help your business stay competitive, your
across every industry, practically every IT organization needs a modern data center
modern business initiative has become that can provide the agility, security, and
an IT project, and IT is now more crucial scalability required to drive innovation
to the success of the business than ever and growth in the digital era. It all begins with
before. Businesses must bring innovative the infrastructure foundation. A modern
products and services to market faster infrastructure is based on a software-
than their competitors, which, in turn, defined, hyper-converged architecture that
means that IT must rapidly and continu- spans compute, storage, networking, and
ously deliver applications and services that security with unified management. This
drive productivity and efficiency. architecture enables an enterprise-ready,
high-performance data center that is
The problem is that many IT environments
• More flexible, because it’s hardware-
are unable to deliver the level of respon-
independent
siveness that businesses demand. That’s
because traditional IT infrastructure is often • More agile, because it’s highly automated
laden with purpose-built hardware and and programmable
fragmented management tools, resulting
in complex deployment and operational •More cost-effective, because it’s scalable
processes that ultimately slow the delivery and built on commodity hardware
of IT applications and services. Managing
disparate and siloed infrastructure is • More secure, because network and
also resource-intensive, forcing IT staff to security policies are attached to
waste valuable time and effort fighting individual workloads
fires and performing manual, repetitive
tasks, instead of using their knowledge and IT must partner with business stakeholders
expertise to contribute to more strategic, to innovate, to accelerate time to market for
innovative business initiatives. products and services, and to consistently
deliver an engaging and superior customer
A recent IDC report found that in experience. IT can position itself to
many enterprises, IT professionals deliver the speed, unified operations, and
spend 70 percent of their scalability that are essential for businesses
time dealing with operational in the digital economy by modernizing
issues instead of focusing on their data centers with a software-defined
more strategic projects. infrastructure.
What Is a Software- abstracted from the underlying physical
Defined Infrastructure? hardware. This enables IT to reduce
Enterprises need a modern, software- provisioning time from days to seconds,
defined infrastructure that abstracts and improve operational efficiency with auto-
connects traditional hardware silos, offering mation, and enable a more secure hybrid
a cohesive platform that can respond to the cloud architecture with policies attached
dynamic needs of the business, support to each workload that ensure they meet
both legacy and new applications, and be security criteria wherever they are.
extended to the cloud. A software-defined •C
loud management platform, which
infrastructure helps companies embrace a provides a common approach for
hyper-converged data center strategy that building and running an enterprise-grade
brings together hybrid cloud, ensuring agility, efficiency,
•C
ompute virtualization, which uses and control across both traditional and
software to simulate the existence of cloud-native, container-based applications.
hardware and create a virtual computer This hyper-converged infrastructure
system that can run more than one virtual strategy extends virtualization across the
system—and multiple operating systems entire infrastructure using common hard-
and applications—on a single server to ware that is managed with existing tools
reduce costs through server consolidation, and skill sets. This allows organizations to
increase workload availability and speed deployments and unify and ease
performance, and minimize or eliminate operations, monitoring, and IT manage-
downtime. ment, while also improving their ability to
•S
torage virtualization, which pools scale.
together server-attached flash devices Evolving to a modern, software-defined
and/or hard disks to provide a highly private cloud is the ultimate end goal for
resilient shared datastore suitable for many organizations, enabling them to
a variety of workloads to easily scale achieve
without disruption, significantly simplify
daily operations, and future-proof your • Faster and more responsive deployments
infrastructure. • Unified and easier operations, monitoring,
•N
etwork virtualization, which repro- and IT management
duces the physical network in software, •
Seamless scalability and adaptability to
embedded in the hypervisor layer and changing business demands
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the Forward-thinking organizations are looking
easiest path to a software-defined private to “do the right thing” for their applica-
cloud. HCI integrates compute, storage, tions, and these apps are defining where
and networking onto industry-standard investments are prioritized for the future.
x86 servers with direct-attached storage When organizations look at the landscape
(DAS) and common management tools, of their apps, they quickly realize that,
enabling a building-block approach to soft-
as they virtualize them, they can also
ware-defined private cloud with scale up
consolidate hardware and eliminate many
and scale-out capabilities and automated
of the dependencies these apps have on
management and orchestration (see the
any specific infrastructure layer. Being able
following figure).
to deploy and manage an entire set of appli-
cations without worrying about traditional
infrastructure requirements like storage
replication, network, quality of service
(QoS), and so on introduces new levels of
business flexibility.
Here are three important considerations
when determining the best path to a soft-
ware-defined private cloud:
A hyper-converged infrastructure enables a building-block
approach to a software-defined private cloud with virtualized
compute, storage, and networking on x86 servers. •
Organizations need to make the right
infrastructure decisions to support the
With HCI, all key data center functions run needs of apps and better connect to busi-
as software on the hypervisor in a tightly
ness objectives.
integrated software layer.
• Some organizations are looking to build
How Do You Start the Journey to fewer apps and actually purchase new
a Software-Defined Private Cloud? apps within “as-a-service” consumption
The application layer is the defining models. When this scenario comes up, it’s
decision point for most organizations as important to conduct a landscape review
they determine the future of their data of your apps and construct a road map of
centers, hybrid cloud(s), and infrastructure. what you’re going to do with them.
•
Organizations may have apps that No matter which path you choose to
can’t be completely removed from the develop a fully capable software-defined
infrastructure due to some type of unique private cloud, there are four key compo-
hardware dependency or requirement, nents that must be part of your plan:
so the need to maintain a data center
becomes a priority. These organizations •C
onsolidate hardware silos to reduce
should still look to remove as many of complexity.
the surrounding hardware dependen-
•A
dopt self-driving operations to assure
cies as possible, thus recovering the time
required to speed up time to market and enhanced performance and capacity
drive the savings/benefit that the organi- optimization.
zation still requires of IT.
• Automate to deliver agility and opera-
tional efficiency.
Although the road from a traditional
infrastructure to a modern software- •E
nable life-cycle management of the
defined infrastructure can be a bit entire software-defined infrastructure
complex, we’ve mapped out two paths that stack, making it simple for the cloud admin
allow you to extend the life of your prior to build and maintain the infrastructure.
investments, leverage your existing
IT knowledge and skills, and minimize
business disruption along the way: The Benefits of a VMware Software-
Defined Infrastructure
• Deploy an all-in-one approach via a
fully hyper-converged and life cycle– For businesses to remain competitive,
managed architecture using VMware IT needs a modern, software-defined
Cloud Foundation that is the simplest and infrastructure that leverages the power and
fastest path to a complete software-de- efficiency of virtualization across the data
fined private cloud and hybrid cloud. center — compute, storage, and networking
— with common management across
• Leverage a reference architecture– all three. A modern, software-defined
based approach, using VMware Validated infrastructure enables businesses to
Designs, to extend the life of existing
investments. VMware Validated Designs •A
ccelerate business responsiveness
provide comprehensive, tested blue- with faster deployment, easier operations,
prints to build and operate a software- and better scalability of hyper-converged
defined data center. infrastructure.
•E
volve infrastructure without risk Download the following guides
by extending your existing VMware from VMware to help you start
environments and skill sets to include the journey to modernizing
hyper-converged storage, network your infrastructure today:
virtualization, and automated life-cycle
management.
•P
repare for the hybrid cloud era with a
solution ready for enterprise and next-
generation applications, while leveraging
common skills and tools across private
and public clouds with a consistent
architecture.
•U
nify data center monitoring and
management including data center
performance, real-time analytics, auto-
mated workload placement and balancing,
and capacity and cost optimization for
better-informed IT decision making.
•L
ower total cost of ownership (TCO)
through server-side economics, on-
demand scaling, simpler management,
and consolidation of hardware silos.
•B
uild a robust, future-proof infrastruc-
ture to serve as the platform for even the
most critical applications and databases.
Test drive software-defined, modern
infrastructure in a hands-on lab at
w w w.v mware .com /go/mo dernize -
infrastructure-hol.
For Dummies is a trademark of John WiIey & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 978-1-119-53549-2
