VMware announced at VMworld earlier this year that they have been working on  implementing VMware Validated Designs. This is a fantastic step by VMware and shows a maturity that has come from years of being the number one virtualisation platform. Cisco had had validated designs for years and I refer to them regularly when deploying Cisco related infrastructure. Through the implementation of validated designs VMware is assisting the community to develop and implement consistent designs across infrastructures which will help provide a consistency and familiarity not currently present. When a new platform is being deployed the elements to consider can include compute, storage, network, security, automation and operations. These are not just reference architectures, the validated designs are constantly updated continuously.

This video gives a bit more of an explanation around what VMware Validated Designs are. The designs have been split into pods, Management, Edge and Compute. Management is made up of vCenter Server, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight and VMware Horizon. Network and security are provided by VMware NSX, storage is provided VSAN. The Edge pod provides additional NSX support to allow external access to compute workloads. The compute pod is the heavy lifting pod.