VMware vRealize Operations Performance and Capacity Management

Software-Defined Data Center

We covered how a VM differs drastically compared to a physical server. Now let's take a look at the big picture, which is at the data center level. A data center consists of three functions—compute, network, and storage. I use the term compute as we are entering the converged infrastructure era, where the server performs storage too and they are physically in one box. There is no more separation and we cannot say this is the boundary where the server stops and the storage starts.

VMware is moving to virtualize the network and storage functions as well, resulting in a data center that is fully virtualized and defined in the software. The software is the data center. We no longer prepare the architecture in the physical ...