Compute Engine

Configuring a virtual data center with the Data Center Designer

Easy, user-friendly, and efficient

Data Center Designer

IaaS made simple with the DCD in the Compute Engine

Flexible configuration of your company’s IT in the public cloud is a step in the right direction to make your entire infrastructure fit for the future and secure. We developed the Data Center Designer (DCD) to simplify the process of building a virtual data center. For us, that’s part of the “service” in “Infrastructure as a Service.”

The browser-based graphic user interface in the DCD provides all the tools you need to create and then modify your own data center in no time at all. Configure your virtual IT infrastructure precisely the way you need it to be.

The DCD: intuitive and easy to use

The way the Data Center Designer works couldn’t be simpler: you just drag and drop the components you need to a whiteboard and arrange them there. You can’t do anything wrong, either. The Data Center Designer checks the plausibility of your configuration in real time.

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Live Vertical Scaling

Live Vertical Scaling lets you adjust your resources via a slider.

Storage

You can also choose any number of HDD and SSD storage units and select their size. It takes just a few clicks to assign the required storage or a CD ROM drive to the servers.

Connectivity

Use the mouse cursor to link your servers and the Internet connections.

Server

Configure each server to match the needs of your company. Cores and RAM are freely scalable.

Firewalls

Firewalls can be added to keep your infrastructure safe.

Load balancers

Add one or several load balancers to your infrastructure to distribute the computing load across several servers and in doing so avoid overtaxing your resources.

Flexible use of RAM and cores

You can add up to 62 cores and 240 GB of RAM to each server if you use AMD processors. Intel CPUs allow you to deploy up to 27 hyper-threaded cores and 120 GB RAM per server instance. There’s lots of storage space available as well: select up to 16 TB HDD storage or 1 TB SSD storage per instance.

The foundation: the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

You can adjust all of the components of your virtual data center using the DCD. This is possible because the Compute Engine provides you with a complete Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) that is not restricted to just dedicated hardware. Here, the software is responsible for administration of the abstracted components. Instead of just virtualizing storage or servers, our SDDC provides an entire virtual data center.

Software defined networking controls the interaction between the components in the background. The DCD generates the necessary protocol commands on your behalf.

Icon: Dedicated resources: Server rack with checkmarks

Use the Data Center Designer to manage complex tasks

You can manage even complex settings thanks to the DCD’s outstanding ease of use. The IP Manager lets you reserve and manage IP addresses in your virtual network, grant permissions, and assign IP blocks to various groups. If DHCP configuration fails, you can also use the DCD to manually assign IP addresses via the remote console. The console allows you to access your server even if a connection via SSH or RDP is not possible.

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Illustration of Compute Engine data center

Image Manager included in the DCD

The Image Manager is used to manage your images and snapshots.

Any HDD and ISO images you upload are listed here - this keeps things neat and allows you to filter files and manage permissions. You can easily add images to your data center via FTP connection.

Tailored server operation with automatic start/stop

Automatic start/stop is another useful function in your Data Center Designer. It is advisable to disable a server and in doing so save costs if it is no longer needed in your infrastructure. The automatic start/stop lets you shut down unused servers and free up additional CPU. Choosing this option will not delete the components from your whiteboard, so you can reboot them if they are needed again later on.

Access your virtual data center at any time

You can configure your resources quickly and easily with the Data Center Designer in Compute Engine — 24/7, even as a hot swap. But not all IT managers like working with a graphic interface. Therefore, it is also possible to control your virtual data center via Cloud REST API. You will find plenty more options to customize your infrastructure in our DevOps community, for instance SDKs, tutorials, and complete modules for a broad range of microservices.