The goal of building an SDDC private cloud is to try to make the infrastructure as invisible as possible, and push as much of the work to a self-service portal as possible. In order to do that, it is critical that the provisioning of the infrastructure matches the workloads that have been deployed. In addition, it must easily adapt to various workloads, and keep the environment updated to the latest software versions, security updates, and patch levels. As the software and hardware go through various revisions over the life of the infrastructure, it is important to have tools that ensure compatibility at various levels. With that in mind, we considered the following attributes:

• Do infrastructure management tools seamlessly provision workload-specific domains with unique attributes customized for that workload domain?
• Do infrastructure management tools work across the entire SDDC stack by deploying the software and configuring the hardware at the same time?
• Do management tools ensure that the various components of the SDDC stack have been tested together?
• Is there a centralized tool for managing the patches and upgrades of all software components?
• How easy is it to cycle infrastructure and move to a new infrastructure?