Mike Brown is a Senior Technical Marketing Architect in the Integrated Systems Business Unit. Mike’s focus is on reference architectures for the VMware vCloud Suite and the Software-Defined Data Center. He has multiple industry certifications, including VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX), VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud, and VMware Certified Professional – Network Virtualization.
Follow Mike on the vSphere Blog and on Twitter @vMikeBrown.
Over the past year VMware engineers and architects have been busy refining, standardizing and documenting our internal testing and validation processes and applying them to real world customer configurations. This is being done in an effort to not only enhance product interoperability, testing and supportability, but to help streamline and facilitate deployments of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The result of this effort is a comprehensive set of documentation targeting specific SDDC deployment architectures and scenarios. Today, I’m happy to announce that the first of these documented designs is now available as the VMware Validated Designs.
VMware Validated Designs are architectures created and validated by VMware experts, encompassing the entire product stack used in VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center. These designs provide standardized and streamlined architectures for each deployment scenario and broad use-case, for example: Datacenter Foundation, Single-region & Dual-region IT Automation, QE / Demo Cloud and more. These designs are being made available to you via customer facing documentation, VMware Professional Services (PSO) delivery kits and certified partner architectures.
So why spend the time and investment in this type of initiative when we already have reference architectures and whitepapers for each product release? While these assets are a great resource; they typically take into account only that product and that version. The VMware Validated Design process takes into account the entire SDDC stack ensuring product version compatibility, continued testing with product releases, upgrade testing and validation to ensure what you deploy today can be upgraded to the next version. In other words the VMware Validated Design:
Is Designed by Experts, Used by You
Each design for a specific deployment scenario has been created by a team of VMware experts. The design has been improved based on live feedback from customers like you.
Is Continuously Validated
Each design is continuously validated by VMware through automated testing. To ensure that once a design has been validated, it stays valid, every new build of any component of the design drops into an automated deployment of the design.
Is a Comprehensive Design
Each Design includes everything needed for a fully functional SDDC covering a set of use cases – yet remains hardware-agnostic. VMware Validated Designs create reference architectures, deployment walkthroughs, deployment guides, operations guides…and more.
Results in Quicker Time to Value
With a quicker deployment of your SDDC you will ensure faster fulfillment of your business needs.
Instills Confidence in your SDDC
Build your SDDC using a design validated by experts—including recommended Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 / ongoing operations. This helps reduce the errors in deploying and operating your SDDC.
Today we are announcing a number of resources being made available to you, our customer. These include two reference architectures and two sets of deployment walkthroughs. The first reference architecture, Data Center Foundation, serves as the foundation for the SDDC, all SDDC architectures build off of the foundation architecture. The second reference architecture, the Single-Region IT Automation Cloud, focuses on enabling IT to rapidly respond to business requirements through automating the SDDC. In addition to the reference architecture there is an accompanying deployment walkthrough for foundation and single-region IT automation detailing how to build out the reference architecture.
We have also launched an early access community under My VMware where you can get access to new documents, provide direct feedback and help influence future designs.
Get started by downloading the Data Center Foundation and Single-Region IT Automation Cloud reference architecture white papers and taking time to step through the deployment walkthroughs. We think you’re really going to like the simplified approach to the SDDC the VMware Validated Designs bring.
Enjoy! Join the early access community here!
