Next in the VVD tools series is one that you might consider cheating, but I want to include as it may be non-obvious for folks not familiar with the VVDs. Ergo a short post to explain how super useful the VVD published documents themselves are, even if you don’t intend to fully deploy a VVD design.

The VVD document set

Describing the VVD programme itself leads into all sort of interesting discussions around standardization, VMware-wide recommended design practices, the value of shared operational guidance, increased time-to-value, automated deployments, engineered systems approach, etc. However at the heart of VVDs is the prescriptive guidance we give to design, deploy and manage your SDDC – and our primary route to delivering that guidance is through an awesome set of documentation. In my humble opinion, the best documentation that VMware creates, and the best validated/engineered systems approach by a single vendor.

First off, let’s make it clear that the documentation is available for FREE, for anyone to download and use. The easiest way to get the full set is from the My VMware portal: http://www.vmware.com/go/vvd-sddc

In the current package you’ll find the following documents:

Introducing VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center

This provides a short overview of VVDs and why they’re so valuable; lays out the design objectives, explains where to find things in the documentation set, and provides a 10,000-foot view of the SDDC design. I highly recommend you take the time to peruse the twenty-odd pages here as it really provides a great overview and lets you cut straight to where you’re likely to gain the greatest value.

Reference Architecture Guide

This is true bread and butter behind the VVDs, covering both the architecture and the detailed design of the VVD. It best describes itself as follows:

The Architecture Overview discusses the building blocks and the main principles of each layer SDDC management layer. The Detailed Design provides the available design options according to the design objective, and a set of design decisions to justify selecting the path for building each SDDC component.

If you are at all interested in data center design solutions, then carving off a few hours this week to sit down and read this cover-to-cover is time very well spent. This document alone is worthy of its own article, but I’ll let you dig through it and discouver for yourself why it’s such a valuable resource.

Planning and Preparation Guide

This is a step-by-step guide to getting everything lined up prior to the deployment phase, so you’re ready to hit the ground running. All the things that you might need to arrange with external teams, such as network configuration, DNS entries, directory service accounts, storage requirements, etc. Even if you don’t plan to deploy a VVD per se, this is a great checklist for any data center engineer that’s about to tackle a new project, as it’s comprehensive, provides examples, and lays out the detail that you’d need in your own environment.

Deployment Guides

Next comes two deployment guides. The VVD is inherently based on a dual site scenario providing recovery options, hence we publish two guides. The region A guide explains how to deploy all the components needed on the first site including items that are only installed once. If you only have one data center then you can just follow this guide. The region B guide obviously includes components for the second site, but also had additional guidance on the recovery setup which is only needed if you have both sites (e.g. vReplication and SRM).

Upgrade Guide

One of the benefits of deploying your SDDC software in VVD form is that clearly documented upgrade guidance is provided to show you how to upgrade through the major versions. Each VMware product has its own upgrade path, however, if you’ve ever had to think about how to coordinate the upgrade of multiple products you’ll know that it isn’t as simple as it sounds. Providing a clear path of compatibility through each step, with rollback options when things don’t go according to plan, carving up the process into business-feasible outage windows, ensure that any pause points are still viable and working, when to take backups, etc. It’s not a simple process.

Fortunately, the current upgrade guide is relatively short as the differences in design and in particular software between VVD 2.0 and VVD 3.0 meant less guidance is required. One thing that’s not apparent from the documents is the behind the scenes work that goes on to provide feedback and improve the cross-SDDC upgrade path. We’re working hard to make these kinds of upgrades easier, and to keep this guidance as minimal as possible.

Operational guidance

There are several guides currently under the Operational Guidance section: Monitoring and Alerting, Backup and Restore, Site Protection and Recovery, and Operational Verification. All come under the banner of Operational Guidance. One of the benefits of adopting, or at least aligning to a VVD design, is making use of the operational guidance, or Day 2 guidance as it’s often known.

For example, nowhere that I know of in the wealth of VMware resources available, explained in what order you should safely power down (and power-on) multiple VMware products. This is included in our guidance papers. Again, even if you’re not using a full VVD, this is very handy information to have at your disposal if you work with VMware products. The operational guidance is an area we’re keen to add more detail to in 2017, so let me know if there are specific areas you like to see us cover.

Use-case documents

Another growth area for the VVD documents are the use-cases. These are subsets or supersets of the VVD to address common scenarios, while still providing the same building blocks as the VVD. If you start with one use-case, you can expand your solution in the future to incorporate additional use-cases or the full VVD for SDDC design. This allows you to target the real-world needs that your business is demanding.

How to use them

Like most technical documentation there are several ways you can extract value from them. You can use them to literally design/deploy/operate your next data center – we have lots of customers doing just that and reaping enormous benefits from it. You can use the documents as reference material that can enhance your own documentation (and designs) and align to our standards where appropriate. You can use them to educate you and your team about the process of deploying a full SDDC stack, and how all the parts come together.

There are countless more ways you can use these hidden gems, but by merely reading through the content you’re definitely taking the next step towards a better data center in 2017. The real value from the VVD documents is understanding where you can standardize on common practices. It’s time to stop sweating the small stuff and instead focus on the important aspects that are unique to your business.

Get more details about the VVD

Need to know more about VVDs:

– VVD Download package: http://www.vmware.com/go/vvd-sddc

– Product page: http://www.vmware.com/go/vvd

– Individual documents: http://www.vmware.com/go/vvd-docs

– Community page http://www.vmware.com/go/vvd-community

VVD tools series