Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers

by Valentin Hamburger
Released December 2016
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781786464378

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Make the most of software-defined data centers with revolutionary VMware technologies

About This Book

  • Learn how you can automate your data center operations and deploy and manage applications and services across your public, private, and hybrid infrastructure in minutes
  • Drive great business results with cost-effective solutions without compromising on ease, security, and controls
  • Transform your business processes and operations in a way that delivers any application, anywhere, with complete peace of mind

Who This Book Is For

If you are an IT professional or VMware administrator who virtualizes data centers and IT infrastructures, this book is for you. Developers and DevOps engineers who deploy applications and services would also find this book useful. Data center architects and those at the CXO level who make decisions will appreciate the value in the content.

What You Will Learn

  • Understand and optimize end-to-end processes in your data center
  • Translate IT processes and business needs into a technical design
  • Apply and create vRO workflow automation functionalities to services
  • Deploy NSX in a virtual environment
  • Technically accomplish DevOps offerings
  • Set up and use vROPs to master the SDDC resource demands
  • Troubleshoot all the components of SDDC

In Detail

VMware offers the industry-leading software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture that combines compute, storage, networking, and management offerings into a single unified platform. This book uses the most up-to-date, cutting-edge VMware products to help you deliver a complete unified hybrid cloud experience within your infrastructure.

It will help you build a unified hybrid cloud based on SDDC architecture and practices to deliver a fully virtualized infrastructure with cost-effective IT outcomes. In the process, you will use some of the most advanced VMware products such as VSphere, VCloud, and NSX.

You will learn how to use vSphere virtualization in a software-defined approach, which will help you to achieve a fully-virtualized infrastructure and to extend this infrastructure for compute, network, and storage-related data center services. You will also learn how to use EVO:RAIL. Next, you will see how to provision applications and IT services on private clouds or IaaS with seamless accessibility and mobility across the hybrid environment.

This book will ensure you develop an SDDC approach for your datacenter that fulfills your organization's needs and tremendously boosts your agility and flexibility. It will also teach you how to draft, design, and deploy toolsets and software to automate your datacenter and speed up IT delivery to meet your lines of businesses demands. At the end, you will build unified hybrid clouds that dramatically boost your IT outcomes.

Style and approach

With the ever-changing nature of businesses and enterprises, having the capability to navigate through the complexities is of utmost importance. This book takes an approach that combines industry expertise with revolutionary VMware products to deliver a complete SDDC experience through practical examples and techniques, with proven cost-effective benefits.

Table of contents

  1. Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers
    1. Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers
    2. Credits
    3. About the Author
    4. About the Reviewer
    5. www.PacktPub.com
      1. eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
    6. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the color images of this book
        2. Errata
        3. Piracy
        4. Questions
    7. 1. The Software-Defined Data Center
      1. The demand for change
      2. Business challenges:  The use case
        1. The business view
        2. The IT view
      3. Tools to enable SDDC
      4. The implementation journey
        1. The process category
          1. The process change example in Tom's organization
        2. The people category
          1. The people example in Tom's organization
        3. The technology category
          1. The technology example in Tom's organization
        4. Why are these three topics so important?
      5. Additional possibilities and opportunities
        1. The self-healing data center
        2. The self-scaling data center
      6. Summary
    8. 2. Identify Automation and Standardization Opportunities
      1. Automation principles
        1. Day two automation
        2. The 80:20 rule
        3. Think big, start small
        4. The efficiency bottleneck
        5. Bringing it all together
      2. Script or workflow
      3. Identifying processes and how to automate them
      4. IT delivery frameworks
        1. What if no CMDB or ticket management is in place
          1. Achieving standardization
        2. Deployment standards
      5. Organization automation examples
        1. Simple VM deployment
        2. The hybrid cloud deployment
          1. The analysis of the hybrid cloud deployment
          2. The better approach
      6. Summary
    9. 3. VMware vSphere: The SDDC Foundation
      1. Basics and recommendations for vSphere in the SDDC
        1. Distributed Resource Scheduler
        2. Resource pools
        3. Storage DRS
        4. Distributed Virtual Switch
        5. Host Profiles
      2. vSphere configuration considerations
        1. Separate management cluster
        2. Management cluster resource considerations
          1. Separate management VDS
      3. The payload cluster
        1. The resource pool approach
        2. The cluster approach
      4. Storage Policy Based Management
        1. SPBM definition
      5. Integrated vSphere automation
        1. Best practices and recommendations
      6. Summary
    10. 4. SDDC Design Considerations
      1. The business use case
        1. The business challenge
        2. The CIO challenge
        3. Constraints, assumptions, and limitations
          1. Constraints
          2. Limits
          3. Assumptions
      2. Scalability and future growth
        1. vRealize Automation
        2. vRealize Code Stream
        3. vRealize Orchestrator
        4. vRealize Operations Manager
        5. vRealize Business
        6. vRealize Log Insight
        7. NSX
      3. Design and relations of SDDC components
        1. Logical overview of the SDDC clusters
        2. Logical overview of the solution components
          1. The vRealize Automation design
            1. Small
            2. Enterprise
        3. Infrastructure design examples
          1. Network
          2. Storage
          3. Compute
        4. Designing the tenants
          1. Tenants, business groups, and infrastructure fabrics
          2. What is a tenant?
            1. What is a business group?
            2. What is a fabric group?
            3. What is the infrastructure fabric?
        5. What must be included in the design
          1. What if the vSphere environment is already running?
      4. Summary
    11. 5. VMware vRealize Automation
      1. vRA installation
        1. First things first
        2. Advanced installation configuration
      2. vRA concepts
        1. vRA's little helper
          1. DEM
          2. The IaaS server
          3. vRealize Orchestrator
        2. The Infrastructure tab
          1. Endpoints
          2. Compute Resources
          3. Reservations
          4. Managed Machines
        3. The Administration tab
          1. Approval Policies
          2. Directories Management
          3. Catalog Management
          4. Property Dictionary
          5. Reclamation
          6. Branding
          7. Notifications
          8. Events
          9. vRO configuration
      3. vRA concepts
        1. As a Service synonyms
          1. IaaS
          2. PaaS
          3. XaaS
        2. Blueprints
          1. Single machine blueprints
          2. Multimachine blueprints
          3. Application automation
      4. Sample configurations
        1. Template preparation in vCenter
        2. Creating a network pool
        3. Creating a set of properties
        4. Creating the IaaS blueprint
        5. Publishing the blueprint as a service
      5. Summary
    12. 6. vRealize Orchestrator
      1. vRealize Orchestrator principles
        1. Workflow elements and design
          1. Attributes, inputs, and outputs
            1. Inputs
            2. Attributes
            3. Outputs
            4. Configurations
            5. Workflow elements
      2. Workflow creation 101
        1. Creating the workflow
        2. Integrating the workflow into vRA
          1. Adding the properties to the blueprint
      3. External services
      4. Connecting vRO to vCenter
        1. vRO context actions in vCenter
          1. Finding and enabling context actions
            1. Enabling a context-based workflow
      5. Summary
    13. 7. Service Catalog Creation
      1. Service catalogs
      2. Defining a catalog
        1. Multiple catalogs
          1. Catalogs: As less as possible as many as required
          2. Provide basic catalogs as well as specific catalogs
          3. Choose a descriptive and short name
          4. Outcome-oriented versus technology-oriented
            1. Know your audience
      3. Service catalog creation in vRA
        1. First step: Creating the catalog
        2. Second step: Publishing catalog items
        3. Third step: Entitling a service
      4. Multimachine blueprint design example
        1. Software components
        2. Sample application design
          1. Defining the components
            1. Apache web server
            2. PHP web component
            3. MySQL web component
            4. FST Industries web component
            5. FST Industries DB component
          2. Defining the blueprint
      5. Summary
    14. 8. Network Virtualization using NSX
      1. Network Virtualization 101
        1. Current networking infrastructures
        2. VLAN: Network virtualization known for almost 30 years
        3. Traditional routing and security
        4. Modern network approach
          1. L3 Networking - the new architecture
          2. Network virtualization for the rescue
        5. NSX terminology
          1. VXLAN
          2. EDGE
          3. Logical Switches
          4. VTEP
          5. NSX controller
      2. NSX setup and preparation
        1. ESXi prerequisites for VXLAN / NSX
        2. Network prerequisites for NSX
        3. Step 1: Installing NSX manager
        4. Step 2: Setting up the components
          1. Prepare the ESXi hosts
          2. Deploy the NSX controller nodes
          3. Defining the segment ID
          4. Configuring the transport parameters
          5. Set up the transport zone
        5. Step 3: Virtual networking 101
          1. Add a Logical Switch
          2. Add a Distributed Logical Router
          3. Add a EDGE services Gateway
          4. Dynamic routing between virtual and physical
      3. Connecting vRealize Automation
        1. Network reservations
        2. Setting up NSX network profiles
          1. The external profile
          2. The NAT profile
          3. The routed profile
        3. Using NSX network profiles in blueprint
      4. Summary
    15. 9. DevOps Considerations
      1. What is DevOps
        1. Agility meets policies
        2. How does DevOps work
          1. What are containers
            1. Containers are not VMs
            2. Container host: Virtual or physical
          2. DevOps and Shadow IT
      2. Radical new IT approach
        1. Cattle versus pets
          1. Changing the organizational culture
      3. PaaS as part of DevOps
        1. The Cloud Foundry framework
          1. Cloud Foundry and the SDDC
        2. vRealize Code Stream: DevOps without containers
          1. All about the pipeline
          2. vRealize Code Stream integration
      4. SDDC and DevOps: A mixed world
        1. DevOps requirements
        2. Enterprise requirements
        3. Legacy and DevOps: Coexistence in one environment
      5. Use DevOps principles to manage the SDDC
      6. Summary
    16. 10. Capacity Management with vRealize Operations
      1. Capacity monitoring in the SDDC
      2. vRealize Operations Manager
        1. vROps 6.3 deployment workflow
        2. Capacity monitoring
        3. Overprovisioning and resource allocation
        4. Navigating vRealize Operations Manager
          1. Capacity remaining
      3. Capacity planning
        1. Projects in vRealize Operations Manager
        2. Reports in vRealize Operations Manager
        3. Views in vRealize Operations Manager
      4. Summary
    17. 11. Troubleshooting and Monitoring
      1. Monitoring and analytics in the SDDC
        1. The risk of false positives
        2. Management versus payload monitoring
          1. Management monitoring
          2. Payload monitoring
          3. KPIs versus thresholds
      2. vRealize Operations Manager
        1. Analytics using vRealize Operations Manager
          1. Exploring vRealize Operations Manager anomalies
          2. Badges and what they describe
            1. The Health badge and how to read it
            2. The Risk badge and how to read it
            3. The Efficiency badge and how to read it
        2. Service health information in vRealize Automation
      3. Log management in the SDDC
        1. Millions of log entries
        2. Log management from the big data perspective
        3. vRealize Log Insight
          1. SDDC components to add to vRealize Log Insight
          2. How to analyze logs using vRLI
          3. Using the Interactive Analytics View
          4. Creating and using dashboards
          5. The pro-active analytics features
      4. Summary
    18. 12. Continuous Improvement
      1. Continual Service Improvement
        1. Technical assurance
          1. Reviewing blueprints
          2. Reviewing automation and integration
      2. Revisiting the business case
      3. ITIL in the SDDC
        1. Matching the requirements to the solution
        2. Applying continuous service improvement to the SDDC
      4. Summary

Product information

  • Title: Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers
  • Author(s): Valentin Hamburger
  • Release date: December 2016
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781786464378