With the first day of VMworld 2016 almost in the books, several exciting product announcements have already been made. In the area of SDDC and hybrid cloud, earlier today we announced VMware Cloud Foundation, our new unified SDDC platform for the hybrid cloud. Cloud Foundation offers an accelerated path to SDDC by bringing together vSphere, VSAN and NSX into a natively integrated stack that is dead simple to manage and maintain. This is achieved thanks to the new VMware SDDC Manager that is included in Cloud Foundation, and brings new unique capabilities around the automation of the bring up, configuration and patching/upgrade of the entire stack. Very exciting! To learn more I recommend reading this blog by Raj Yavaktar, our VMware Fellow.

Cloud Foundation offers an integrated platform approach to the creation of a SDDC-based cloud. VMware provides you with the key piece parts and the built-in automation to manage the software stack so that you don’t have to invest time and money in doing it yourself. This approach has clear benefits and works for a lot of people, but there are also many customers who need or want to use a more typical “do-it-yourself” approach, selecting individual cloud infrastructure components and integrating them themselves. I can think of many valid reasons for choosing the “do-it-yourself” path: maybe you are not planning to move to HCI, or maybe you are not ready organizationally, or perhaps you simply want to use a more hands-on approach, etc. We recognize that when it comes to building the cloud there isn’t a one-size-fits-all option, and we want to ensure that all our customers will successfully complete this crucial transformation.

Designing and implementing an SDDC outside of an integrated and automated framework comes with its own challenges. Customers who choose to go down the “do-it-yourself” path are asking us for guidance on how to bring individual software components together using best practices that ensure a reliable, repeatable and scalable deployment. Customers want the peace of mind that software components interoperate well together, and that the decisions they make today won’t prevent them from growing their environment tomorrow. This is where VMware Validated Designs come in. Today we are delighted to announce that the new release VMware Validated Designs 3.0 will become available by the end of September!

Before going over the details of what’s new, let’s recap what VVDs are

VMware Validated Designs provide a comprehensive and extensively-tested set of blueprints for building and operating an SDDC. They are holistic and standardized data center-level designs that span across compute, storage, networking, and management, providing a proven framework for how to deploy, configure, and operate an SDDC-based private cloud in support of a wide range of use-cases.

The core documentation provided with each VMware Validate Design release includes:

• Solution Overview that details design objectives software components and related tested versions
• Reference Architecture
• Design Guide

In addition, we provide a set of operational guides and tools that synthetizes best practices on how to plan, deploy and operate the SDDC. These include:

• Planning and Preparation Guide
• Deployment Guide
• Operational Guides for:
  • Monitoring and Alerting
  • Patching, Updating, and Maintenance
  • Security and Compliance
  • Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  • Startup and Shutdown
  • Backup and Restore

Using VMware Validated Designs as the blueprint results in an SDDC deployment that is consistent, thoroughly documented, extensively tested from end-to-end, and continuously validated to incorporate new releases of software components.  This allows for both a standardized deployment model that aligns with best practices as well as investment protection for the future. We see growing customer interest in building SDDCs that follow the VMware Validated Designs, and some are already reaping the benefits. For example, one global service provider has successfully used VMware Validated Designs to accelerate their design and implementations of the SDDC from months to mere weeks, while ensuring product integration and interoperability. They then utilized operational guides to improve their internal processes and on-going SDDC management.

Now let’s talk about what’s new with VMware Validated Designs 3.0

As the version number indicates, this is already our third VVD release this year. Our engineering team has been doing a tremendous job incorporating feedback from early adopters to extend the applicability of the VVDs and add more elements to them. Here are the key improvements we are delivering with the 3.0:

1. Flexible Deployment with Distributed Management and Workload Architecture

This architecture simplifies the initial startup, reduces startup hardware cost, and provides flexibility for future growth. In the Management pod, all solutions for the management, automation and operations of an SDDC are instantiated. An initial shared Edge and Compute pod is implemented to deploy business workloads and provides north-south routing access to them. As the SDDC grows, additional Compute pods can be added to run more business workloads, or the Edge can be separated and powered by a dedicated Edge pod.

2. Dual-Region Deployment and Operational Guidance

This release includes the expansion from single-region deployment and operations guidance to dual-region support. A dual-region deployment allows an organization to implement the SDDC across two geographical locations, providing portability of applications, and enabling disaster recovery capability of SDDC management, automation and operations solutions between regions.

3. VMware Validated Design for Use-cases

Organizations are shifting their focus toward use-cases, and VMware Validated Designs plays a critical part of that shift. This release provides three designs for customers who are looking for different outcomes:

– VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center: encompassing all software components of the SDDC, this Validated Design provides an agile platform for multiple applications and outcomes.

– VMware Validated Design for Micro-segmentation: this Validated Design allows higher security for all applications in the data-center with dynamic security at VM-level based on attributes.

– VMware Validated Design for IT automating IT: automate the delivery and ongoing management of production-ready infrastructure and application components to reduce the time it takes to respond to requests for IT resources and to improve the ongoing management of provisioned resources.

Once you build the environment for one use-case, you can add more software components for additional use-cases, or grow to the full Software-Defined Data Center.

Want to learn more?

If you are at VMworld and want to learn more about VMware Validated Designs, stop by our VMware booth, try the Hands-On-Lab (HOL 1706-SDC-5)  or join us in these sessions:

For a sneak peek of the design, and to stay updated on what we are cooking up, please join the VMware Validated Designs community at vmware.com/go/vvd-community where you can also get answers to your questions and provide feedback on the designs.

Useful Resources

• Learn more at http://vmware.com/go/vvd
• Join the community at http://vmware.com/go/vvd-community
• Test drive VVD with Hands-On-Lab vmware.com/go/vvd-hol (Available publicly after VMworld US)
• Read the comprehensive documentation for each design
• Follow our playlist on YouTube
• Follow @VMwareSDDC on Twitter