The IT Melting Pot!

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“VMware is pleased to announce the release of the vCAT 3.0 material.

The VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit provides technical and operational guidance for cloud success. It includes the tools and guidance to build, operate, and consume an industry-leading cloud computing infrastructure solution. Unlike a Reference Architecture which focuses on one use case, this architecture toolkit includes support for multiple use cases and combinations of use cases. It is based on field experience with hundreds of customers and partners. It is validated by internal and external individuals and is supported by VMware as the de-facto reference for vCloud deployments. This is offered free of charge.

It is available for download at http://www.vmware.com/go/vcat under the registration section. Look for the ‘Register’ link.

Audience

This release has expanded content for architects, administrators, and consumers of a vCloud infrastructure. It supports enterprise customers and service providers.

VMware Validated Architecture Toolkit

This material has been created and validated by multiple organizations within VMware including Global Solutions and Enablement (GSE), Engineering and QA, Global Support Services (GSS), Tech Marketing, Product Management, Alliances, members of the Partner Technical Advisory Board, vendors, and others. Our Continuous Product Development (CPD) organization is currently reviewing this material to also provide validation. Part of this validation includes successful use for internal VMware vCloud projects including the VMworld lab environment.

Value Proposition

– Created by experts to HELP YOU BECOME AN EXPERT.
– Demonstrates REAL WORLD EXPERIENCE, not just theoretical gluing together of products.
– Creates a BASELINE to form a common knowledge base, or starting point, for cloud architectures.
– It is a DE-FACTO REFERENCE POINT for many questions that arise around both VMware vCloud and Cloud Computing environments.

Scope

We focus on Infrastructure as a Service for private, public, and community clouds. This material can be expanded to support other cloud models such as community and government clouds.

We include information on people, process, and technology. We have added several new sections that include workflow examples (vCenter Orchestrator), software tools, and cloud bursting theory.

This material is designed as an engineering document. It is written to provide flexibility in support of third party technologies integrated with VMware technologies. Vendors can provide their integration guidance at http://www.solutionexchange.vmware.com

This is a large body of material at over 700 pages across multiple documents. We have included reading guidance in the Introduction for the three audience categories. The documents include:

* Core Documents
– Introduction
– Service Definitions
– Architecting a VMware vCloud
– Operating a VMware vCloud
– Consuming a VMware vCloud
– Implementation Examples

* Tools and Advanced Topics
– Workflow Examples
– Software Tools
– Cloud Bursting

* Additional supporting documents such as Document Map, Release Notes, and Errata.

For this, our third major release, we have added a Documentation Center that can be used online or offline. The Documentation Center provides the ability to navigate and search through the library of toolkit documents, with access to PDFs from the user interface, and translations via Google Translate when Documentation Center is served from a web server. This is our first release of material using this technology and hope it will provide a benefit to your team members.

Technologies

The technologies used include the following including all features of each product where appropriate for a vCloud deployment.
– VMware vSphere
– VMware vCloud Director
– VMware vCloud Network and Security (App, Edge, Endpoint, Data Security)
– VMware vCenter Operations Manager
– VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager
– VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
– VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
– VMware vCenter Orchestrator
– PowerCLI, vCloud API
– VMware IT Business Management
– VMware vFabric RabbitMQ
– VMware vFabric Applications Director
– VMware vFabric Hyperic
– VMware Site Recovery Manager”

//Richard