A virtual data center (VDC) is a non-tangible abstraction of physical IT infrastructure components that are designed for business needs of enterprises. Virtualization technologies allow the VDC to offer the same compute as well as data storage, networking and data access capabilities of traditional IT infrastructure, while decreasing costs, complexity and maintenance.
Virtualization can speed up hardware provisioning and on-demand scaling to support the growth of businesses. It also supports agile software development practices and DevOps. This makes it a natural fit for more modern IT architecture. It also lowers IT support and labor costs, which allows companies to invest 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 at the same time (public cloud). In either case, the virtualization of the platform can reduce operational and maintenance costs.
Physical hardware for creating and deploying the VDC is available from a variety of vendors or can be leased through an IT managed service provider. It’s also referred to as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) because it combines computing, storage and network equipment into an entire system that runs an operating system and can scale up and down.
A VDC can be run on a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and VMware. It can be utilized in a hub-and-spoke network design with core infrastructure deployed in the hub, and workloads and applications installed in spokes. This architecture matches the structure of corporate roles and responsibilities, as well as providing lower costs through component and data flow centralization, as well as simpler management, operations, and compliance.