VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform for the private and public cloud. Cloud Foundation brings together compute, storage, and network virtualization into a closely integrated stack that can be deployed on-premises or run as a service from the public cloud.

The service architecture focuses on deploying it in an on-premises configuration and also as an extension to the public cloud. The Cloud Foundation architecture is shown in the following figure:

Cloud Foundation adds several unique capabilities in addition to the core features and capabilities provided by vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and cloud management components.

VMware Cloud Foundation creates a foundation for the SDDC by using workload domains. A workload domain is a policy-based resource container (logical architecture) with specific availability and performance attributes, and combines compute, storage, and network into a single consumable object for a specific purpose.

Cloud Foundation includes the following workload domain types:

• Management workload domain
• Virtual infrastructure workload domain
• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workload domain

This logical architecture is the foundation for the automated installation of software components, and helps to configure the appropriate services as per customer business objectives. Figure 2 shows the logical software component design for Cloud Foundation:

Cloud Foundation can help with automated installation and configuration...

VMware Cloud Foundation is a hardware integrated solution. This means that it not only provides software configuration, but also provides automation for much of the physical hardware configuration. The following diagram depicts the standard physical rack configuration for Cloud Foundation:

A Cloud Foundation rack consists of the following components:

• Spine switches: This system comes with two spine switches that extend the network schema of the top of rack switches between racks and enables inter-rack connectivity. You can communicate between the uplink ports of the ToR switches and the spine switches. We require spine switches in multi-rack deployments, which are located in the second rack.
• Management switch: The management switch helps public connectivity with the baseboard management controller...

The primary source of storage for Cloud Foundation is vSAN. For example, a 1U server can have eight disks in the capacity tier and two disks in the caching tier. All disks are claimed by vSAN for software-defined storage.

The amount of available physical storage in workload domains depends on the number of physical hosts. The total capacity that is usable is also dependent on the availability requirements for the workload domains that are being configured. Storage policies are configured and specific to the workload being configured.

The following diagram depicts a typical storage configuration for Cloud Foundation:

In this configuration, storage traffic is carried over the 10 GBPS links between the hosts and ToR switches. All vSAN members communicate over this 10 GBPS network. Best practices recommend...

The Cloud Foundation network is preconfigured to allow for simplicity of the configuration and provide the services as appropriate services for the rack. The physical configuration of the network is shown in the following diagram:

All hosts in a physical rack are connected to both ToR switches with 10 GB links. NIC port 1 is connected to ToR switch 1 and NIC port 2 is connected to ToR switch 2, with link aggregation (LAG) on each host.

The BMC is connected to the management switch over a 1G connection on each host. This connection is used for OOB management. Both ToR switches are further connected to a pair of spine switches in a dual-LAG configuration using 40G links. The spine switches are an aggregation layer for connecting multiple racks.

Cloud Foundation is designed...

Cloud Foundation controls the software as well as hardware in the environment using SDDC Manager. SDDC Manager is shown in the following diagram:

SDDC Manager has three major functions, as described in the following sections.

SDDC Manager is capable of managing and monitoring the virtual, as well as physical, components of Cloud Foundation. SDDC Manager further helps you in Cloud Foundation configuration, operations, and management configurations, allowing you to do the following:

• Abstract, pool, and automate the physical components into a virtual entity.
• Scale up/down hosts or switches to the rack. Adding more racks brings scalability, performance...

Service architecture principles define the underlying general rules and guidelines for the use and deployment of all IT resources and assets across the customer environment. They showcase a level of understanding among the different lines of business of the customer, and form the basis for making future architecture/roadmap decisions.

The architecture is based on a design of services, which mirrors customer business objectives that comprise business processes. Service-orientation delivers business agility and a boundary-free information flow. Service representation utilizes business descriptions to provide business processes, goals, rules, policies, service interfaces, and service components, which implements services using service orchestration. Service orientation places special requirements on the infrastructure, and implementations should use open standards to get...