A virtual data centre (VDC) is an abstraction of physical IT components that are designed to meet the requirements of business of enterprises. Virtualization technologies allow a VDC to provide the same compute as well as data storage, networking and data access capabilities as traditional IT infrastructure, while simplifying costs, complexity and maintenance.
Virtualization facilitates faster provisioning of hardware, and on-demand scaling in order to handle the growth of businesses. It is a great tool for agile software development and DevOps practices, making it the perfect fit for modern IT architecture. It also reduces IT support and labor costs, allowing the company to spend more on innovation.
VDCs can be developed on-premise in the central physical location (private cloud), or hosted by a third party that provides cloud services to multiple companies simultaneously (public cloud). Virtualization can cut the costs of operation and maintenance in both cases.
The physical hardware used to build and implement a VDC can be purchased from an individual vendor or leased through an IT managed services provider. It’s sometimes referred as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) because it blends computing, storage and network equipment into an infrastructure that runs on software platforms and can scale up and down.
A VDC can be run on various operating systems including Linux, Windows, and VMware. It can be deployed as a hub-and-spoke network design, with the basic infrastructure located in the hub and applications and workloads located in spokes. This design is in line with the organization structure of roles and responsibilities, while providing reduced cost through component and data flow centralization, as well as easier operations, management, and compliance.