LEARNING MADE EASY

VMware and Special Edition Modern Infrastructure

Simplify application complexity

Reduce costs and protect investments

Accelerate time-to-market

Applications are key to successful digital model results in a lack of cooperation transformation initiatives in the enterprise. and more friction across teams, costly These applications drive revenue, create redundant resourcing, and greater risk competitive differentiation, and empower in maintaining governance and policies employees and decision makers with of the different parts of the stack. advanced analytics and essential insights to connect and engage with customers in In this guide, you learn how a modern real time. infrastructure can help your organization achieve the agility, flexibility, and scal- To be successful, enterprise IT must proac- ability to run your enterprise application tively manage an ever-growing portfolio of portfolio in a hybrid cloud. business applications, matching the needs of each application to the underlying Application Needs Have Changed — resources that support that application. Can Your Infrastructure Deliver? The public cloud offers new opportunities to deliver an optimal environment for indi- Modern applications are complex: they’re vidual applications in the enterprise appli- built on virtual machines, containers, cation portfolio, but not every application Kubernetes clusters, and microservices can, or should, run in the public cloud. connecting to enterprise data ware- A modern infrastructure enables organi- houses and data lakes spanning multiple zations to operate their -defined public cloud environments. Legacy infra- data centers (SDDCs) as private clouds structure based on traditional three-tier and extend the benefits of the cloud to architectures adds complexity and gets in their on-premises applications to help IT the way — it slows the business down and meet specific goals for their entire appli- limits flexibility and innovation. And now is cation portfolio. not the time to be slow or limited — both the pace of delivery and our increased A traditional, unvirtualized dependence on applications are acceler- enterprise infrastructure typically consists of phys- ating. One VMware study estimated that ical compute, storage, and — because of new tools and platforms, network resources running in more developers, Agile and DevOps prac- an on-premises data center. This legacy tices, and lots of code reuse — more infrastructure is managed by different logical applications will have been created teams using various tools operating in in the five years ending in 2023 than in the disparate silos. This complex operating preceding 40 years! Whether deploying advanced analytics to Increasingly the decision to run customize product and service offerings an application in an on-prem- to consumer behaviors and preferences, ises data center or move it to the cloud is a business decision standing up next-generation storefronts that is based on the value of the appli- to sell goods online and at the edge, or cation, the impact it will have on the driving self-service experiences to deliver business, the cost and complexity of a superior customer experience while migrating an application or data center, reducing labor costs, businesses are and the benefits that can be achieved driven by applications. The range of appli- in the cloud. Organizations need to cations is broad and serves a variety of answer the following questions to help purposes throughout the organization, them decide how to optimize, manage, and support their application portfolios from building revenue and customer rela- across on-premises data centers and tionships to increasing employee produc- cloud environments: tivity and effectiveness. • What are the requirements of The applications themselves are vast and the application? include traditional enterprise applications • How will the application be such as email, database management managed and scaled? systems, enterprise resource planning • What is the business value (ERP) systems, and big data, as well of the application? as more specialized applications such as electronic medical records (EMRs), • What kind of environment does e-commerce, point-of-sale (POS), direc- the application need to maximize its business impact? tory services, and security software tools. • Can the application be migrated These applications are increasingly being to a public cloud, and is the cost of deployed and operated across a diverse rebuilding or refactoring the appli- cation for the cloud warranted? infrastructure landscape. The range of deployment options — from on-premises A modern infrastructure provides organi- data centers and public clouds to remote zations with options so that the answers or branch locations — can present unique to these questions don’t necessarily limit challenges. the organization to an either/or choice. IT Operations require a set of centralized ware innovations from Intel, VMware’s management tools to manage the levels broad portfolio of software of performance, security, compliance, products, container orchestration, and AI availability, etc. that the Hybrid Cloud tools are optimized to run on 2nd Genera- infrastructure delivers. Intel and VMware tion Intel Xeon Scalable processors. have co-developed a Hybrid Cloud Data Using Hyperconverged Infrastructure Analytics Solution for your consideration as a Building Block to help you make these decisions; here are resources for more information: Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the basic IT building block in a SDDC that elim- Easily Consumable Hybrid Cloud Data inates the complexity of traditional data Analytics Solution: Reference Architecture center infrastructure. HCI natively inte- grates all data center functions — including Next-Generation Hybrid Cloud compute, storage, and networking — in a Data Analytics Solution virtualized platform that is operated and monitored through a unified manage- This reference architecture and companion ment console. Combining VMware SDDC solution brief on the Hybrid Cloud Data with Intel architecture deliver HCI solu- Analytics Solution describes a hybrid tions that enable IT organizations to confi- cloud solution that can manage existing dently integrate public clouds to scale enterprise workloads (like using SQL and extend their businesses. VMware’s and NoSQL databases for transactional industry-leading cloud technologies and processing) but also extends capabilities Intel technology help customers fully to include compute- and memory-hungry leverage hybrid clouds and connect and artificial intelligence (AI) jobs. From data manage workloads on-and-off premise for increased agility, capacity, transparency, warehousing to machine learning and visibility and resilience. Powerful automa- deep learning, the Hybrid Cloud Data tion and orchestration tools enable you to Analytics Solution is what enterprises need build on your HCI foundation, extending as data volumes continue to swell, and the capabilities and benefits of both the data centers are increasingly pressured to SDDC and the public cloud to deliver a provide real-time insights to launch their complete hybrid cloud infrastructure that businesses into the future. This solution is addresses current and future application a unique combination of the latest hard- and infrastructure needs. Key benefits of HCI in the Without a modern infrastructure and SDDC include the following: consistent operations across their on-premises data centers and public, private, and edge cloud environments, • Simplicity : Eliminate the complexity of organizations may experience challenges managing different hardware compo- managing these heterogeneous environ- nents and infrastructure silos found in ments, including the following: legacy data center environments. • Increased risk while managing infra- structure and the applications with • Cost : Reduce capital hardware invest- different operations teams, tools, and ments, improve cost and storage processes in the data center and cloud efficiency, leverage existing in-house technical expertise, and take advantage • Slower time to market as different IT processes for different environments of flexible “pay-as-you-grow” scalability. negatively impact responsiveness and agility • Agility : Proactively address dynamic business needs with broad deploy- • Higher cost due to less flexibility and ment choices (no vendor lock-in), inability to quickly migrate and scale to on-demand scalability (both “up” and meet infrastructure demands “out”), and support for traditional and modern applications (including • Limited visibility across all environ- cloud-native, containerized, and micro- ments, causing higher security risk services-based). and service-level agreement (SLA) violations due to multiple disparate management tools and processes Adopting a Cloud Operating Model • Skills shortages as organizations need Building a modern infrastructure with to build competence with multiple envi- HCI as the basic building block enables ronment-specific tools and processes significant freedom, flexibility, and cost advantages for the enterprise. Next, IT To get the most out of full-stack organizations must adopt a hybrid cloud HCI, organizations need to adopt platform that enables them to unlock new a cloud operating model that levels of efficiency, agility, and intrinsic is service oriented and policy security in order to deliver long-term value driven. It must also offer robust automa- by adopting a cloud operating model. tion and orchestration, rapid elasticity and scalability, and on-demand self- VMware Cloud Foundation is a next-gener- service capabilities for both traditional ation hybrid cloud platform. It provides a workloads and cloud-native applications complete set of software-defined services currently in development. for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management to run enterprise Achieving this cloud operating model apps — traditional or containerized — in requires a modern infrastructure private or public environments. Cloud delivered in a holistic, software-defined, Foundation drastically simplifies the path and integrated platform. A modern to the hybrid cloud by delivering a single infrastructure enables enterprise IT integrated solution that is easy to operate, thanks to built-in automated life-cycle organizations to unify and manage management. Now with the integrated infrastructure silos together to deliver cloud management capabilities, the end cloud-compatible services by reducing result is a hybrid cloud platform than can complexity, controlling costs, and increasing span private and public environments, agility. A modern infrastructure for the offering a consistent operational model cloud supports traditional and modern based on well-known VMware vSphere applications running in diverse environ- tools and processes, and freedom to ments spanning from the data center to run applications anywhere without the the edge to the cloud with a universal complexity of application rewriting. hybrid cloud platform that delivers consistent infrastructure and operations Cloud Foundation uniquely provides the anywhere. following capabilities and benefits: • Integrated stack: Cloud Foundation is Running Modern Applications an engineered solution that integrates on VMware Cloud Foundation the entire VMware software-defined stack with guaranteed interoperability, Applications are changing, so the platform freeing organizations from dealing with that they run on must change, too. A cloud complex interoperability matrixes. platform must support both traditional • Automated life-cycle management: and modern applications side-by-side, Includes unique life-cycle manage- with native container support, application ment services that automate day 0 programming interface (API) consumable to day 2 operations, from bring up to services, and built-in Kubernetes orches- configuration, resources provisioning, tration. and patching/upgrades. • Simple path to hybrid cloud: Dramat- tions freely across environments ically simplifies the path to the hybrid with consistent infrastructure cloud by delivering a common plat- and operations. This model elim- form for private and public clouds, inates the unnecessary cost, enabling a consistent operational complexity, and risk of refactoring appli- experience that leverages existing cations simply to move to a new envi- tools, processes, and people. ronment. If your organization is ready to • Broad ecosystem: Can be flexibly build a modern infrastructure foundation deployed on-premises on certified for hybrid cloud, look no further. VMware hardware from major original equip- Cloud Foundation is the ideal hybrid cloud ment manufacturer (OEM) vendors platform for managing VMs and orches- or run as a service from VMware’s trating containers, built on full-stack own VMware Cloud on Web hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) tech- Services (AWS) or from a select number nology. With a single architecture that’s of VMware Cloud providers. easy to deploy, VMware Cloud Foundation Expanding to Hybrid Cloud enables consistent, secure infrastructure and operations across private and public Given the dynamic needs of applications cloud environments. across the enterprise application portfolio, it comes as no surprise that hybrid cloud VMware Cloud Foundation accelerates development of modern applications and is the new normal — in fact, two-thirds automates the deployment and life-cycle of organizations are looking for a hybrid management of complex Kubernetes envi- cloud solution according to the VMware ronments alongside mission-critical enter- Cloud Market Study (January 2018). They prise applications. Take advantage of a need a strategy that supports the modern complete set of software-defined services applications they need to compete, and for compute, storage, networking, security, those applications need the freedom and and cloud management to run enterprise with the ability to scale incrementally over apps — traditional or containerized — in time, organizations can take advantage private or public environments. VMware of gen-over-gen improvements in tech- Cloud Foundation drastically simplifies nology. the path to the hybrid cloud by delivering a single integrated solution that is easy to Within a hybrid cloud environment, orga- operate, thanks to built-in automated life- nizations have the ability to move applica- cycle management. Prepare for tomorrow, today — with a Check out the following resources from modern, future-proofed hyperconverged VMware to help you transform your data infrastructure solution. Realize the bene- center with a modern infrastructure: fits of VMware vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, including: simplified manage- • VMware Modernized Data Center ment, flexible deployment options, Solution Overview enhanced application performance, stan- • VMware Cloud Foundation: Integrated dardized architecture, maximized scale Hybrid Cloud Platform datasheet and IT efficiency, intrinsic security, and more. • VMware Cloud Foundation Hands-on Lab

• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, VMware 2nd Special Edition

• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): How to Scale and Optimize for Today’s Realities

• VMware HCI Intel Optane VDI: Prin- cipled Technologies Report

• SQL Server on HCI for Dummies

For Dummies is a trademark of John WiIey & Sons, Inc. VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud, and the VMware logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Optane, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

ISBN: 978-1-119-72494-0