sec D Chapter 2 - Software Defined Data Center.pdf

SOFTWARE DEFINED SYSTEMS
Course Code: SWEG5108
Target Group: 5th Year Software Engineering
Instructor: Biniam Behailu
2024

The need for SDDC
01
What is SDDC?
02
Key Components of SDDC
03
Data Center Archtypes
04
SDDC architecture overview
05
Outline
SDDC vs Traditional data center
06
SDDC implementation with VMware
07
Benefits and challenges
08
Chapter 2
Software Defined Data Center

The need
 The internet world is making a significant changes how digital
businesses operate. The increasing number of internet users and the
widespread adoption of mobile devices have led to a significant
increase in online activities and interactions.
 This generates a tremendous amount of data that companies can
collect and analyze.
 The drive to improve IT agility pushes organizations to explore new
data center architectures.
 Organizations need to accelerate the delivery of technology services
while retaining control over IT, minimizing complexity and reducing
costs.
Compiled by : Biniam Behailu Software Defined System 3

What is Software Defined Data Center?
 Software-Defined Data Center, is an architectural approach to data
center design and management that leverages software-based
automation and virtualization technologies to abstract and pool data
center resources.

 “A Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is a data storage facility in
which all elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage, CPU
and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service. Deployment,
provisioning, configuration and the operation, monitoring and
automation of the entire infrastructure is abstracted from hardware
and implemented in software.” (Forrester)
 It results from years of evolution in server virtualization.

 The key idea behind an SDDC is to bring the benefits of virtualization
and automation to the entire data center infrastructure stack.
 This enables greater flexibility, scalability, and efficiency in data
center operations.
 With an SDDC, IT administrators can provision and manage resources
through a single management interface, and applications can be
deployed and scaled more rapidly, making it easier to respond to
changing business needs.

Compute virtualization
 Compute virtualization allows users to create software
implementations of computers that can be turned up or turned down
as needed, decreasing provisioning time.
 SDDCs heavily rely on server virtualization technologies, such as
hypervisors like VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, to create
virtual machines (VMs) that run multiple operating systems and
applications on a single physical server.

Compute virtualization - tools
 VMware Workstation
 VMware Fusion
 Vagrant
 Microsoft Hyper-V
 RedHat Virtualization

Network virtualization
 Network virtualization, where the network infrastructure servicing
your VMs can be provisioned without worrying about the underlying
hardware.
 Network infrastructure needs telecommunications, firewalls, subnets,
routing, administration, DNS, etc., are configured inside your cloud
SDDC on the vendor’s abstracted hardware. No network hardware
assembly is required.

Network virtualization - tools
VMware NSX: Best for zero-trust security
Check Point Virtual Systems: Best for network automation
Cisco Enterprise NFV: Best for Cisco infrastructure
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: Best for Windows Server
Environments
oVirt: Best open-source virtualization management solution
Red Hat OpenStack Platform: Best for large-scale deployments

Storage virtualization
 Storage virtualization, is the pooling of physical storage from multiple
storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device -- or
pool of available storage capacity.
 A central console manages the storage.
 It allows the pooling of multiple storage devices, such as hard drives,
solid-state drives (SSDs), or network-attached storage (NAS) systems,
into a single virtualized storage system.

Storage virtualization - tools
 StarWind Virtual SAN
 Nutanix Acropolis
 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure
 DataCore SANSymphony

Management and automation software
 SDDCs use management and automation software to keep business
critical functions working around the clock, reducing the need for IT
manpower.
 Remote management and automation is delivered via a software
platform accessible from any suitable location, via APIs or Web
browser access.

Management and automation - tools
Cisco Unified Computing System
VMware EVO SDDC
OpenStack

Datacenter Archtypes
 For the SDDC to be most applicable to enterprises, it must meet four key
requirements—key pillars of the SDDC architecture :
First, it must run traditional applications, without re-architecting them.
Second, it must enable IT organizations to build on their existing skills in
running virtualized IT environments, while providing developers with self-
service access.
Third, it must enable both on-premises data centers and cloud-based
services, with seamless management across both.
Last, it must securely protect the infrastructure while providing elastic
scaling or bursting of services.

Data center Arch types
 The VMware is an SDDC platform that enterprises can adopt to run
any application on top of any x86, storage, and IP network hardware.

SDDC vs Traditional Data Centers
 An SDDC is characterized by several unique factors as compared to
traditional data centers.
First, all infrastructure in an SDDC is fully virtualized. Physical
servers, networking gear, and storage arrays are abstracted from the
workloads that run in the SDDC.
Virtualization not only decouples workloads from hardware but also
makes data center services easy and inexpensive to configure,
manage, and consume.

Second, SDDC brings automation, operations, governance, and
business insight to IT through a cloud management platform.
Unlike legacy management tools, the cloud management platform is
purpose built and deeply integrated with the underlying
virtualization layer.
This integration provides comprehensive insight, automation, and
operations to a dynamic data center environment, enabling IT to
easily orchestrate provisioning, management, and monitoring across
all SDDC infrastructures and workloads.

An SDDC architecture is also geographically agnostic because the
logically defined infrastructure resources can span across data
centers, including those owned by IT or cloud service providers
leveraging the same SDDC platform.
Using the SDDC cloud management platform to holistically manage
these data centers—those of IT and those of the service provider—
enables enterprises to operate a hybrid cloud.
Finally, people and processes in an SDDC evolve from manual, day-
to-day operations to supporting business priorities by offering
infrastructure, applications, data, and IT services to business users
on demand.

Outcomes Delivered by a Software-Defined Data Center
An SDDC delivers business outcomes across two main areas:
• First, it enables companies to shift resources toward innovation and business
growth by driving efficiency and ensuring that IT no longer is a rate-limiting
step in launching new business projects.
 Data Center Virtualization and Hybrid Cloud Extensibility – Significantly
reduces CapEx by standardizing services on logical resources and simplifying
the data center footprint
 Streamlined and Automated Data Center Operations – Drives ongoing
operational efficiency and helps administrators spend more time on value-
added projects
 Application and Infrastructure Delivery Automation – Rapidly delivers holistic
IT services on demand, from traditional multitier applications to in-memory
databases—HANA/GemFire, and distributed high-performance computing
workloads—Hadoop

• Second, SDDC helps companies deliver secure and resilient services
with two key outcomes for IT:
 Security Controls Native to Infrastructure – Shifts security from
perimeter defense to fine-grained isolation with micro-
segmentation and policy based access controls.
 High Availability and Resilient Infrastructure – Simplifies the
architecture needed to support business continuity and
automation of the disaster recovery process.

Getting to the
Software-Defined
Data Center with
VMware
24

VMware
 VMware is a virtualization and cloud computing software provider
based in Palo Alto, Calif. Founded in 1998, VMware is a subsidiary of
Dell Technologies.
 Because the VMware implementation of the SDDC is hardware and
location agnostic, companies have a wide set of options in leveraging
products and services from VMware and its partners.
 Most enterprises leverage a hybrid cloud strategy, choosing to
transition existing data centers into software-defined architectures
while also leveraging public cloud services.

Software-Defined Data Center Architecture Overview
 Applications in an SDDC run entirely on logically defined resources for
which the underlying hardware is abstracted away.
 In this sense, the SDDC architecture is hardware agnostic, with the
requirements as basic as x86 servers, with disks, and a simple packet-
forwarding network backplane.
 A completely virtualized infrastructure enables the SDDC cloud
management platform to analyze trends and apply machine learning
to help self-regulate the IT environment.

VMware Architecture for the Software-Defined Data Center

Implementation Options
 Overall, there are three approaches to building an SDDC, each with its
own benefits and rationale.

Build Your Own
 Purchase hardware and SDDC software. Integrate them in-house via
reference architectures. For example, all Fortune 500 companies today
virtualize their servers with vSphere, the first step in building an SDDC.
 “Build Your Own” offers two key benefits:
First, it enables enterprises to gradually transform over time in deploying
network virtualization, software-defined storage, and a cloud management
platform.
Second, because an SDDC is hardware agnostic, this approach also provides
an extremely wide range of hardware options to choose from, so
enterprises can choose hardware configurations they believe are optimized
for certain workload types.

Converged Infrastructure
 Converged Infrastructure, a model through which traditional data
center components such as shared storage arrays, servers, and
switches are integrated and sold in a single framework.
 A prescriptive software stack frequently is preinstalled, often with
server virtualization.
 This approach simplifies the hardware engineering and integration
process and enables customers to adopt the remaining SDDC
components—network virtualization.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure(HCI)
 HCI aims to do three things:
First, it preinstalls and integrates all SDDC components server, storage, and
network virtualization, as well as cloud management, so the customer
immediately gets the full benefits of an SDDC.
Second, it essentially implements a reference architecture developed by
VMware with its hardware partners, which reduces complexity for IT.
Third, it automates the ongoing life cycle management of the
infrastructure, whether it is updating an SDDC software component. For
example a vSphere such as updating firmware from hardware vendors.
 Security patches are also automated in the same manner.

Software-Defined Data Center Technologies Delivered by VMware

Benefits of SDDC
 Implementing an SDDC architecture can offer both short- and long-
term benefits.
 The primary short-term benefit is agility. With an SDDC, you can
dramatically reduce the time needed to provide new resources.
 It no longer takes days or weeks to set up a new physical server,
provide more storage capacity to an application or modify physical
networking.
 Policy-driven automation can further accelerate provisioning,
enabling you to deploy resources in minutes.

Benefits of SDDC
Business agility
 An SDDC can also help improve infrastructure performance.
 It allows you to optimize compute, storage and networking for each
application and workload without having to make physical changes to
the infrastructure.
 Balance
 Flexibility
 Adaptability

Benefits of SDDC
Reduced Cost
 Organizations that house their data in-house require additional IT
manpower, expensive equipment, time, and maintenance. Those that
have not put much thought into data storage, for example, may suffer
the possible costs of potential data breaches. An expensive hardware
malfunction is yet another possibility that could cause loss of data.
 Cloud SDDCs operate similarly to SaaS platforms that charge a
recurring monthly cost. This is usually an affordable rate, making an
SDDC accessible to all types of businesses, even those who may not
have a big budget for technology spending.

Challenges
 The primary challenge is gaining cross-functional agreement.
 Standardization across teams is crucial to adopting SDDC, but many
traditional IT organizations are bound by siloed processes and policies
that make standardization difficult.
 Getting procurement teams, development teams, IT analysts, system
administrators and others aligned on new tooling and processes can
take time.

THANK YOU
?
"Software-defined data centers are
the symphony of technology,
where orchestration and
automation harmonize to unleash
the full potential of digital
infrastructure, transforming the
way we store, process, and deliver
data in a symphony of agility,
scalability, and efficiency."

sec D Chapter 2 - Software Defined Data Center.pdf

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