Virtualized vs Software Defined data center - Techtalk 39

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hi welcome to virtualized jeep tech talk episode number 38 this is keith townsend from virtualizedgeek.com and we're going to talk cloud computing again today but specifically we're going to talk orchestration and the importance of orchestration orchestration is the ability to take your data center components and automate the provisioning and basically managing of those components so there's kind of a mix conception now at least i believe there's a misconception out that if you virtualize all of your data center components your storage your compute your networking that

you have a software-defined data center that's not actually true the point of a software-defined data center is that you have a single pane glass or close to as close to a single pane of glass or api's into the data center to be able to control your data center so the advantages of software-defined data center you know let's talk about cloud or private cloud nirvana the ability to for a service provider to say that hey you want to migrate your data center to my data center great

we don't have to talk about the underlying infrastructure i can just carve out virtually a portion of my data center this let's say it's all x86 based compute that will give you a virtual network it'll give you virtual compute resources virtual storage resources you'll be able to set policies around that storage if you need it to be if you need physical isolation fine uh but there's no need to talk to a person uh you can through a portal go through to the portal and say that

you know what i need these units to be physically isolated onto its own x86 platform that's fine the data center provider can magically provision those resources for you and in theory you have a completely abstracted data center that can move from point a to point b we shrink that down to the enterprise layer and talk about well from an enterprise perspective if i have a completely modular data center meaning that i can expand and shrink my data centers physical footprint as needed because it's software defined

and i can take out physical modular blocks out of that data center and shrink my data center or grow it based on need and then some magical orchestration layer handles the provisioning of network storage compute security profiles storage uh performance challenges all that stuff is handled uh by some type of orchestration software so just virtualizing your infrastructure doesn't get us there you know we think about something as simple as a firewall and when we virtualize a say a checkpoint firewall and put it into vmware well

from a physical resource perspective we've taken a what had traditionally been a physical resource and made it a virtual resource but we haven't really changed the management uh of that firewall you know we don't have the physical cabling considerations anymore so on the back end we can you know create dmz vlans uh specific uh private and public interfaces onto that firewall but pushing rules to that firewall i still need to go to my checkpoint management console create a ruler rule set and push it to that

firewall so there's no northbound communication out of the box just because i've virtualized a resource same thing with storage unless i'm using some advanced software uh on my uh compute platform either whether it be from nutanix uh vmware's vsan or even emc skill io unless i'm using some specialized storage platform to create storage profiles and provision the storage and guarantee quality of service and speed or class of service for specific applications i still have a lot of the same management nightmares that i had in the

physical world so just virtualizing a platform does not give us the software defined data center so this is kind of where we're at in the challenge so when we look at uh kind of the major three components of software defined uh compute storage and networking you know we kind of see different levels of maturity from the compute portion of it we're pretty mature you know amazon is pretty good at being able to provision your resources uh vmware openstack this is all things that's kind of old

head to us storage is starting to get there um vmware's vsan is a good move into the future we still have an awful lot of challenges when we talk about the when you still need legacy and i don't want to call them legacy because it's kind of the state of the art when i need uh the scale of hds or vmax system uh and there's real in you know server-based san is really not an option for me that orchestration layer and that it breaks at the

software layer same thing for networking nx has given us a tremendous amount of capability when it comes to northbound apis and controlling the network uh the capability that you know i talked about in the blog post uh about the goldilocks zone and security is amazing what we'll be able to do in the future when apis are leveraged for security uh but for network provisioning and automation nsx most definitely is there for the physical network but when we talk about extending the physical network via vx lands

and provisioning in the type of provisioning that needs to be done for the physical network or for physical physical components of the network that won't go away i'll still always have uh hp ux titanium based servers that need to be provisioned that need uh network ports and need to share network segments with my virtual machines those challenges will still be there so hopefully uh you know dell's dell just recently released a open switch which has that type of well theoretically will have that type of northbound

api access that will be able to provision these types of resources on the fly so quick hit video less than 10 minutes wanted to recap kind of the uh just because we have a completely virtualized and environment you can be 100 virtualized but if you don't have kind of that northbound api access you don't have a software-defined data center you have a completely virtualized data center but not a software-defined data center and for us to get to our example uh cloud infrastructure whether it be private

or public uh nirvana example we gave in the beginning you need you need orchestration in order for orchestration to happen we need the api level access so that's it for this episode of virtualizedgeek.com like the youtube video uh please comment here or on virtualizegeek.com talk to you guys next installment