A virtual data center (VDC) is an abstract representation of physical IT infrastructure components designed for business needs of enterprises. With the help of virtualization technology, a VDC offers the same compute storage, networking and data access capabilities as traditional IT infrastructure, but can reduce costs complexity, complexity, and maintenance, while enhancing the speed and agility of.

Virtualization allows for faster hardware provisioning, and scaling on demand to support business growth. It also facilitates agile software development practices and DevOps, which makes it an ideal fit with modern IT architecture. It also reduces IT support and labor costs, which allows companies to invest more on innovation.

VDCs can be built on premises in the central physical location (private cloud), or hosted by a third-party that provides cloud services to several companies simultaneously (public cloud). Virtualization can lower the cost of maintenance and operations in both instances.

The hardware needed to build and deploy a VDC can more be purchased from the vendor or leased by an IT managed services provider. It’s also referred to as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) because it combines storage, computing and network equipment into an integrated system that runs on an operating system and can scale up and down.

A VDC is compatible with a range of operating systems like Linux, Windows and VMware. It can be deployed in a hub-and-spoke network design with the core infrastructure installed in the hub and workloads and applications deployed in spokes. This design is in line with the organization structure of roles and responsibilities, as well as providing lower costs by utilizing components and data flow centralization and simpler management, operations, and compliance.