Table Of ContentHow the
Software-Defined
Data Center Is
Transforming
End User Computing
The Essentials Series
sponsored by
David Davis
The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
Article 1: Why Infrastructure Matters in Desktop and Application Virtualization ...................... 1
The State of Desktop Virtualization ............................................................................................................. 1
The State of the SDDC ......................................................................................................................................... 1
VDI Design Considerations .............................................................................................................................. 3
Desktop Virtualization: Dedicated Infrastructure or SDDC? ............................................................ 3
Summary .................................................................................................................................................................. 4
Article 2: Building the Future of the Desktop on the Software-Defined Data Center ................. 5
What Is the SDDC? ............................................................................................................................................... 5
SDDC Focuses on Business Outcomes ......................................................................................................... 6
Application-Centricity ........................................................................................................................................ 6
SDDC: One Destination, Three Ways to Get There ................................................................................ 7
Open Systems or DIY ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Converged Infrastructure ............................................................................................................................ 7
Hyperconverged Infrastructure ............................................................................................................... 8
How the SDDC Is Changing the Data Center ............................................................................................. 9
SDDC and the Cloud ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Summary ............................................................................................................................................................... 10
Article 3: SDDC–Powered Virtual Desktops and Applications ........................................................... 11
Three Pillars of SDDC and Desktop/Application Virtualization ................................................... 11
Virtualization ................................................................................................................................................. 12
Software-Defined Storage ........................................................................................................................ 12
Software-Defined Networking ............................................................................................................... 13
Management, Automation, and Orchestration ................................................................................ 14
Bringing It All Together: HCI ................................................................................................................... 14
Selecting the Right Platform for Your VDI ............................................................................................. 14
Summary ............................................................................................................................................................... 15
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
Article 1: Why Infrastructure Matters in
Desktop and Application Virtualization
Years past have been touted as the “Year of VDI,” or desktop virtualization, as if there was
some magical fulcrum where, in that year, organizations everywhere would all throw out
their old physical PCs and embrace virtual desktops. Needless to say, that event hasn’t
happened and probably won’t. It’s not that there is something flawed in the desktop
virtualization vision. In fact, the desktop virtualization vision is valid and gets more
compelling every day as the software and hardware that make it possible matures. Desktop
and application virtualization now form a core pillar of most organizations’ initiatives
around desktop transformation—the evolution of client computing to embrace a wider
range of delivery approaches including private and public cloud across an even wider set of
use cases including remote offices, knowledge workers, designers, road warriors,
contractors, and business partners/outsourcing. The migration to desktop virtualization
for companies of every size and across every vertical is happening, month after month, day
after day. The momentum builds as the expectations of the end users and the company
executives grow in anticipation of greater workforce mobility, flexibility, and security from
their desktop infrastructure. That momentum also builds as technology advances make
desktop virtualization easier to deploy, higher performing, and simpler to manage.
The State of Desktop Virtualization
Thanks to the rising importance of business mobility, the BYOD trend, and improvements
in the underlying technology, the rate of adoption of desktop virtualization is faster today
than ever before. Virtual desktop infrastructure (inclusive of both desktop and application
virtualization) is becoming foundational to end user computing strategy. And increasingly,
that foundation is being built on a more agile, intelligent, high-performance
infrastructure—known as the software-defined data center (SDDC).
The State of the SDDC
The SDDC vision extends the benefits commonly derived from server virtualization
including the abstraction, pooling, and automation of compute capacity, to all the resources
of the data center inclusive of networking and storage. With the SDDC in place, common IT
infrastructure processes can be shortened from days to minutes or even seconds. For
example, the process of provisioning a new virtual server that might have taken 5 days in
the past (due to storage configuration, network configuration, and ancillary services) could
be shortened to just a few minutes or even seconds, with cloud-like service elasticity,
thanks to the SDDC’s inclusion of all IT infrastructure services (see Figure 1.1).
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
Figure 1.1: The SDDC Transforming Deployment (Source:
https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/accelerate/VMW_13Q1_BB_SDDC_020813_FINA
L_LTR.pdf)
The vast majority of enterprises are already using VMware vSphere—86% of data centers
will be virtualized by 2016 (Source: CIO Insight, Useful Virtualization Stats, Trends, and
Practices, August 28, 2014), so they have already “abstracted and pooled,” although many
still need to automate. With more than 15 million applications already deployed into
virtual infrastructures (Source: VMware blogs, Tribal Knowledge, September 8, 2014),
enterprises are now looking for greater innovation in their data center to make IT a
platform for true business agility. Thanks to the traction already seen with server
virtualization and the prevailing desire among IT leaders to adopt cloud-like services
capabilities, the SDDC vision is starting to take hold in the IT strategy and vision happening
in enterprises around the world.
Even the smallest of enterprises knows that the future of the data center is in smarter and
faster software and there are many good reasons for that—greater efficiency, flexibility,
agility, and cost savings are all gained with a software-defined approach: By upgrading an
already virtualized data center to an SDDC, enterprises can slash their capital expenditures
by 58% (Source: VMware blogs, Tribal Knowledge, September 8, 2014).
So how does the SDDC impact desktop and application virtualization?
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
VDI Design Considerations
As enterprises move to VDI, three key challenges consistently emerge:
• The significant upfront investment associated with infrastructure CAPEX as well as
the protracted cycle time incurred in the design, procure, build, integrate, and test
disciplines necessary before putting a solution into production
• The reduced flexibility and lack of capacity elasticity found in traditional siloed data
center architectures that are hardware-defined instead of software-defined,
resulting in inflexibility to business demand
• The increased security threat resulting from the proliferation of virtualized users
now sitting on the trusted side of the data center firewall and co-resident with other
mission-critical server workloads such as Oracle, SAP, and Exchange
Desktop Virtualization: Dedicated Infrastructure or SDDC?
Some might recommend de-risking VDI by purchasing a dedicated server, storage, and
virtualization stack. Although this approach offers some predictability in performance, it is
also extremely inefficient, costly, and unneeded. In addition, it exacerbates the dilemma of
growing silos of infrastructure that are managed separately, resulting in inefficient scaling,
longer lead times for service turn-up, and escalating CAPEX. Clearly this approach takes
organizations even further from the ideal of cloud-like service elasticity.
SDDC, in comparison, offers an evolved, intelligent, cloud-like approach to delivering the
infrastructure that is exactly suited to the unique demands of VDI. VDI workloads are
dynamic and resource hungry. User behavior that drives VDI resource consumption is
largely unpredictable, unlike its server-workload cousins. VDI workloads need more
security, agility, and performance than do traditional workloads. Let’s look at the attributes
needed by VDI and what that the SDDC offers in response. The following list highlights the
capabilities of the SDDC:
• Unified management. Single point of management for all resources in the data
center for ease of troubleshooting and maintenance
• Efficiency. More efficient use of resources that are virtualized, distributed, and
balanced across the infrastructure, accessible to any workload that needs it
• Automation. Greater automation in provisioning, deployment, and configuration
for reduced time to service
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• Cloud-like elasticity and economics. Thanks to greater automation, resource
sharing, and distributed intelligence, capacity can grow in fine-grained increments
that offer a cloud-like “pay as you grow” approach
• Improved security. Through software-defined network security and policies,
security is persistently and pervasively extended in an automated manner across
the virtual infrastructure
• Simplified cloud adoption. Workloads can be easily transitioned to a public or
hybrid cloud, and back, as needed, based on use case or business demand
VDI workloads are well-mapped to these capabilities, offered by the SDDC, as much as or
even more so than server workloads. It’s no wonder that SDDC solutions in the
marketplace often cite VDI as a primary use case.
With these capabilities, desktop and application virtualization implementations built on
SDDC benefit from:
• Better performance, allowing desktops and applications to tap into the consolidated
capacity across the infrastructure
• Automated turn-up of desktop capacity, inclusive of compute, storage, and
network/security
• Simplified manageability from device to data center to desktop virtual machine
• Centralized security policy that places every desktop virtual machine in its own
virtual network firewall for persistent security that follows desktop workloads
across the infrastructure
• A holistic platform for workspace services delivery that ensures desktop and
application access across any combination of virtual, cloud-hosted and traditional
physical desktop
Summary
Desktop and application workloads shouldn’t be relegated to an infrastructure island.
Although these workloads require special infrastructure design compared with traditional
server workloads, that doesn’t mean that dedicated server and storage hardware is
required, especially for organizations looking to leverage a cloud-like model for their
architecture with greater service elasticity and economics. VDI workloads need the
attributes of the SDDC as much as, or more than, any other workload in the data center.
After all, when you think of desktop virtualization, you think of efficiency, agility, security,
and cloud infrastructure—all of which are tenets of the SDDC. Bottom line, when deploying
desktop and application virtualization, ensure that you leverage an architecture that’s built
on the SDDC.
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
Article 2: Building the Future of the
Desktop on the Software-Defined Data
Center
When considering the software-defined data center (SDDC), think of the dynamics of a free
and open market. For example, financial markets work on supply and demand. Changes
happen rapidly and are dynamic, if not unpredictable. Fortunes are won or lost on the basis
of being able to react to opportunity faster than one’s competition. IT is increasingly facing
similar challenges to embrace the notion of service elasticity to better respond to changing
business demand without overprovisioning capacity and wasting CAPEX while incurring
minimal OPEX to manage it all. This notion is a core tenet of the SDDC, which is by nature
efficient, agile, and dynamic and that’s exactly the kind of underpinning needed for any
successful desktop transformation initiative.
What Is the SDDC?
Past (and many current) IT platforms were, or are, closed silos of resource inefficiency.
Enterprises demanded greater efficiency, flexibility, agility, and value from their IT
investments, which led to the transformation of the data center to a software-defined
alternative.
As discussed in the first article, the SDDC offers many benefits over the hardware-defined
data center (HDDC), its aging predecessor. The SDDC eliminates management complexity
and allows enterprises to transform to a model where they can abstract IT functions such
as deployment, provisioning, configuration, and hardware operations and instead use the
power, versatility, and scale of software and virtualization. Enterprises embrace SDDC in an
effort to make IT more agile, scalable, and cost efficient while eliminating the traditional
constraints that have tethered enterprises in the form of hardware lock-in.
Of course, the SDDC still requires hardware, but that hardware can be just about any x86
industry-standard server, filled with the CPU, memory, and storage capacity (many times
it’s flash storage) specified in alignment with the expected workload characteristics, in this
case, desktop virtual machine profiles (see Figure 2.1).
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Figure 2.1: SDDC
SDDC Focuses on Business Outcomes
Traditional IT usually gets caught up in purchasing, maintaining, and managing technology
for the sake of technology. We in IT love technology but what we all too often do is lose
track of the needs of the business and the business outcomes that we are there to provide.
The SDDC is application-focused and all about business outcomes. What is a business
outcome?
An example of a business outcome is to deliver revenue growth through better agility and
responsiveness to market conditions or demands. Consider a retailer that needs to improve
customer order management and service functions in response to seasonal demand spikes.
Their need for virtual desktop capacity scaling in response to increased traffic between
November 1st and December 25th, or in proximity to a major marketing campaign, is a
proof point of where the SDDC can provide cloud-like service elasticity. The organization
can rapidly reallocate resources, and provision virtual desktops in minutes, for customer
service managers. When demand subsides, the SDDC can reallocate those resources to
other workloads.
Application-Centricity
IT needs to focus on business outcome and, in many ways, the best way to do so in the data
center is to focus on applications and the business roles that use them. The SDDC enables a
focus on applications because of the SDDC’s policy-based management. With the SDDC,
role- and application-based policies can be created; those policies can then be assigned and
the underlying storage and network will immediately adapt to accommodate them.
Then, for example, if an application suddenly needs a higher quality of storage, more
storage I/O, or greater storage redundancy protection, the underlying infrastructure will
immediately adapt to those configurations. The SDDC management tools and automation
systems are also application-focused, allowing you to manage applications in the same
manner.
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The Essentials Series: How the Software-Defined Data Center Is Transforming End User Computing
SDDC: One Destination, Three Ways to Get There
Unlike monolithic data center systems of the past, the SDDC design offers great flexibility in
how it can be implemented. The SDDC doesn’t have to be purchased from a single vendor
with prescribed hardware and software. The SDDC can be fulfilled in one of three ways: do
it yourself (DIY), converged, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
Open Systems or DIY
You can create your own SDDC with your own hardware, virtualization software,
management software, and automation software all layered on top. With the vast majority
of enterprises out there having already virtualized their servers, most enterprises are
already roughly halfway complete with building an SDDC without even realizing it. For
those companies that already have the server hardware and virtualization infrastructure in
place, they need only to add SDDC management and automation layers on top. Optionally,
these enterprises could use hyperconverged storage and compute, and they could use
network virtualization to converge the compute and network (which the next article talks
about in more detail). The challenge here is that an organization must have the design and
operations disciplines in place to be able to deploy the right architecture. Although many
organizations aspire to SDDC, the implied complexity often drives CapEx and OpEx higher
than expected, at the outset.
Converged Infrastructure
Converged infrastructure offers a modular approach to procuring and deploying
infrastructure, offering simplification to organizations that want a faster path to the SDDC,
or those who don’t have the in-house design or operations skills. These solutions typically
come from a single vendor, and are supported with a single phone call to that vendor. Good
examples include NetApp FlexPod or VCE Vblock. In this model, a large rack containing
servers, storage, network, hypervisor, and SDDC management/automation software is
delivered to the customer data center with the hardware design completed and pre-sized
(see Figure 2.2). The virtualization layer, centralized management, SDDC management, and
SDDC automation software is also already preconfigured. Typically, converged
infrastructure solutions come in large to very large step sizes and have traditionally been
only for large enterprises or service providers.
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