So far, this document has discussed virtual machines, their inter-relationships, and relationships to external dependencies. There is, however, another wealth of information that lies within the virtual machines themselves. That information is depicted in the following figure and can be leveraged to take control of facets internal to each virtual machine, such as operating system versions, application runtimes, patch level, and configuration. All present a value proposition brought about by the SDDC, hybrid cloud, and migration tools available for discovery and assessment.

 

Looking at the application not only as a VM and network topology, but also a container of items that hosts application components, you can gather inventories on, for example, Apache Web servers, Java virtual machines, Windows or Linux OS, .Net or other runtimes and their respective configurations/versions. Additionally, information about the physical hardware (as applicable) along with host and application usage can now be captured. In most instances, you need to know about these items to gain control over facets of the application and its container to enable migration to a new environment. With this knowledge, you can plan the migration of many applications that share common components to standardize with regard to accepted versions and configurations. You can also accommodate a service and support model of shared responsibilities, where third parties might be required to execute tasks relative to application operations and maintenance. If you were considering a property management company to manage your remote properties, you would want very clear terms for what must be looked after, and they would want detailed information on how to do so and report back to help establish satisfaction and trust within the relationship.

This phase of Discovery and Assessment results in a repository of knowledge that drives the overall strategy for cloud migration. Developing and harvesting this body of knowledge is critical in creating a foundation that supports many other VMware solutions represented within the vCAT-SP, such as VMware NSX, vRealize Operations, VMware vRealize Automation™, and VMware vRealize Business™. It also forms the foundation for embarking on a more DevOps-centric model which, when based on the VMware SDDC and VMware Cloud Providers running the SDDC, can be completely automated to not only migrate applications to the cloud but re-create them and their dependencies in total. Other content from the vCAT-SP addresses creation from standardized component libraries, including operating systems and application runtimes as well as infrastructure templates, such as the networking and security they require.