Wow. Its been a minute since I posted. Thats because we have been furiously beavering away on the evolution of VMware Validated Design (VVD). Those of you familiar with VVD will know that it was an end to end validated cloud stack that included design and detailed implementation steps required to deploy a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). From version 6.0 to versions 6.2 it was built on top of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform. It was huge, it was monolithic, it was awesome, but it stood distinct from the VCF documentation set, so like everything else it needed to evolve.
So we took a step back and reimagined it all with a few key goals:
- Converge the overlapping areas between VVD and VCF back into the core VCF documentation
- Make it more modular
- Make it easier to maintain and release
And so, aligned with VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3 release, VMware Validated Solutions were born!
The traditional Management Domain and Workload Domain design and deployment elements of VVD were folded back into the core VCF documentation enhancing those sections with traditional VVD rigour – everything else became a standalone entity.
It was so much more than a slice and dice exercise though. Making the layered elements of VVD into a set of distinct VMware Validated Solutions means we were (and will be) able to:
- Focus on the goal for each solution, and in adding incremental value to each
- Create a framework for 2nd and 3rd party solutions to integrate with the VCF ecosystem
- Make them independently releasable and updatable over time (obviously being the first iteration, this is a future goal)
- Introduce a significant amount of automation where we offer PowerShell or Terraform deployment steps in addition to the traditional UI driven process that were VVD.
Here is the initial list of solutions we released yesterday
Identity and Access Management for VMware Cloud Foundation
Developer Ready Infrastructure for VMware Cloud Foundation
Private Cloud Automation for VMware Cloud Foundation
Intelligent Operations Management for VMware Cloud Foundation
Intelligent Logging and Analytics for VMware Cloud Foundation
And the first 2nd party one!
Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation
Each solution is a self-contained module that covers the key design decisions for the solution, the implementation steps, the ops-verification procedures and a solution inter-operability section that shows how design/implementation between the solutions works should you have more than one.
There is also a whole new Planning & Preparation Workbook to go with this release. A huge leap forward in terms of how it presents values required during in implementation and also in the significant number of additional configuration options that are now covered.
I’ll do a separate post on that in the next few days, as its something I have personally spent a lot of time on, and its worth digging in on how it operates.
For now, check out the links and let us all know what you think!
FearDamhan 