What Is Building A Data Center In Virtualization Concepts

Introduction

At the beginning of this course, virtualization was described as the process of installing a hypervisor onto hardware, or an operating system, to allow a user to create virtual machines. A data center can be virtualized in the same manner as a compute system while also providing applications to clients. If you recall, the original intention of a VM is to provide applications in a virtual environment.

A data center has more hardware and software and therefore more computing power than a personal computer or a single server, which makes it able to deliver VMs and applications on a larger scale and more importantly, serve a greater number of users.

Before discussing how the data center works as a whole to deliver applications to end-users, let’s discuss how a data center is built in the first place. Building a data center involves a great amount of hardware, and adding to the complexity of assembling the components, there are a variety of companies that sell data center-level hardware. To simplify the process, a company building a data center can use one of two infrastructure models: a converged infrastructure or a best-of-breed infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure integrates all the data center hardware and software components into a single package from a provider. The provider offers a preconfigured unit optimized for the data center being built. For example, if a company building a data center decides to use a Dell converged infrastructure, the data center will only use Dell hardware. Having a provider put together all the components and provide central management can facilitate faster acquisition and deployment of the data center.

A best-of-breed infrastructure is when the data center has different top-of-the-line components such as best-of-breed servers, storage devices, and networking equipment from multiple vendors. An example would be a data center with Hewlett Packard servers, Cisco networking devices, and IBM storage devices. This type of infrastructure results in a lower cost from competitive pricing prevents vendor lock-in and enables the repurposing of existing data center components.

Once all the components are in place, the data center needs to be managed. A management server is set up to monitor the data center’s performance and allow the administrators to allocate resources efficiently, such as picking which servers to set up as clusters or moving additional storage capacity to a set of VMs. With adequate resources and management, the data center is now capable of sending and receiving data to its customers.​​