The SDDC is not a single product sold by VMware or anyone else. It is an approach whereby management and orchestration tools are configured to manage, monitor, and operationalize the entire infrastructure. This might include products such as vSphere, NSX, vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations Manager, and Virtual SAN from VMware, but it could also include solutions such as VMware Integrated OpenStack, CloudStack, or any custom cloud-management solution that can deliver the required platform management and orchestration capabilities.

      The primary aim of the SDDC is to decouple the infrastructure from its underlying hardware, in order to allow software to take advantage of the physical network, server, and storage. This makes the SDDC location-independent, and as such, it may be housed in a single physical data center, span multiple private data centers, or even extend into hybrid and public cloud facilities.

      From the end user’s perspective, applications that are delivered from an SDDC are consumed in exactly the same way as they otherwise would be – through mobile, desktop, and virtual desktop interfaces – from anywhere, any time, with any device.

      However, with the SDDC infrastructure decoupled from the physical hardware, the operational model of a virtual machine – with on-demand provisioning, isolation, mobility, speed, and agility – can be replicated for the entire data-center environment (including networking and storage), with complete visibility, security, and scale.

      The overall aim is that an SDDC can be achieved with the customer’s existing physical infrastructure, and also provide the flexibility for added capacity and new deployments.

      Software-Defined Compute

      In this book, software-defined compute refers to the compute virtualization of the x86 architecture. What is virtualization? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you’re probably reading the wrong book, but in any case, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.

      In the IT industry, the term virtualization can refer to various technologies. However, from a VMware perspective, virtualization is the technique used for abstracting the physical hardware away from the operating system. This technique allows multiple guest operating systems (logical servers or desktops) to run concurrently on a single physical server. This allows these logical servers to become a portable virtual compute resource, called virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs its own guest operating system and applications in an isolated manner.

      Compute virtualization is achieved by a hypervisor layer, which exists between the hardware of the physical server and the virtual machines. The hypervisor is used to provide hardware resources, such as CPU, memory, and network to all the virtual machines running on that physical host. A physical server can run numerous virtual machines, depending on the hardware resources available.

      Although a virtual machine is a logical entity, to its operating system and end users, it seems like a physical host with its own CPU, memory, network controller, and disks. However, all virtual machines running on a host share the same underlying physical hardware, but each taking its own share in an isolated manner. From the hypervisor’s perspective, each virtual machine is simply a discrete set of files, which include a configuration file, virtual disk files, log files, and so on.

      It is VMware’s ESXi software that provides the hypervisor platform, which is designed from the ground up to run multiple virtual machines concurrently, on the same physical server hardware.

      Software-Defined Networking

      Traditional