The software-defined data center
In Chapter 1, VM – It Is Not What You Think!, we covered how a VM differs drastically from 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 major functions—compute, network, and storage. Security is not a function on its own, but a key property that each function has to deliver. We use the term "compute" to represent processing power, namely, CPU and memory. In today's data centers, compute is also used when referencing converged infrastructure, where the server and storage have physically converged into one box. The industry term for this is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). You will see later in the book that this convergence impacts how you architect and operate an SDDC.
VMware has moved to virtualizing the network and storage functions as well, resulting in a data center that is fully virtualized and thus defined in the software. The...
