What is vcloud

A tenant administrator can configure public catalogs with VMs and VM templates and provide access to users. One of the main concepts of using the cloud configured with the vCloud Director is isolation. In addition to high security, VMware Director is optimized for resource consumption. Each tenant has a specific link for the associated organization to log into the web interface of the VMware Director by using own user account. When resources are needed for a tenant, they are allocated from an abstracted Provider vDC layer for example, a user is starting a VM running a heavy application.

When resources are not needed, they are turned back to the pool for example, a VM is shut down. There are three types of resource allocation for Organization vDC used by VMware vCloud Director — allocation pool, reservation pool, and pay as you go. Allocation pool. The pre-defined percentage of resources is guaranteed, and the maximum available limit is set. The percentage of CPU and memory resources is defined. Reservation pool.

All resources are allocated. Guaranteed resources and maximum limits are equal. A user can edit limits and allocate resources for VMs at any time limits are not set on the VM level by default.

Pay as you go. There are no guaranteed resources and defined limits set for reservation in the resource pool resources seem unlimited for the resource pool. Resources are limited on the VM level. From the point of view of an MSP, the provider can use elastic pool resources rationally and buy new hardware when there are no free resources.

VMware recommends that you use the latest API version. VMware vCloud Director plug-ins are available to extend the functionality of VMware Director, service provider admin portal, and tenant portal. Developers can create their own plug-ins by using the tools mentioned above.

An MSP provides Kubernetes as a service with these features to tenants. In VMware vCloud Director v. As a result, users can create a customized network topology in a virtual data center to connect VMs to the network without the need to know about underlying physical network equipment. The NSX network consists of logical switches , routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, and additional security features. Distributed firewall. Within these VDCs, VMware Cloud Director allows elastic provisioning of network, storage and compute resources, and lets cloud providers define services and offer them to users via a service catalog.

Source: VMware. While VMware Cloud Director is a large and extremely complex offering, below we summarize some of its main capabilities. It can be used to set up an S3-compatible cloud storage service within Virtual Data Centers. Cloudian allows administrators to provision storage pools directly from the vCenter interface, without interacting directly with storage infrastructure.

Cloudian uses the de-facto storage interface of the public cloud, the S3 API, making VMware Cloud Director VCDs compatible with existing cloud deployments and easy to migrate from popular cloud providers. Source: VMware VMware Cloud Director provides the following benefits for cloud providers: Improves resource utilization in data centers and reduces operational overheads Makes it easy to monetize services by publishing a service suite with integrated billing All-in-one solution for building a public cloud with no additional tools or costs API-based approach to enable easy automation and customizability for users VMware Cloud Director Concepts The VMware Cloud Director is based on the following concepts: Organizations —a unit of administration for users, groups, and computing resources.

Authentication of users is managed is at the organization level. VMware Cloud Director system administrators can create and provision organizations, and organization administrators users, groups, and service catalogs. Users and groups —administrators can create users manually or programmatically, or integrate with a directory service like LDAP to import user accounts and user groups at scale.

Virtual Data Centers VDC —a VDC is an isolated environment provided to a cloud user, in which they can provision resources, deploy, store and operate applications and systems.

It can be connected to external networks as needed. Media files and catalogs —VMware Cloud Director organizes deployable resources via media files. These are virtual machine and vApp templates, or machine images that can be used as boot-up disks for a VM. Media files can be attached to vApps and mounted by virtual machines. The organization administrator organizes media files into catalogs, allowing users within the organization to provision the resources they need.

Capability Primarily Used By Details Multi-tenancy Cloud operators Uses bare-metal machines to create a pool of resources that can host and serve many customers, each with complete isolation. Cloud based application provides the service directly to the end user. PAAS: Platform as a service. It offers cloud based environment from end to end that required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web-based applications. You no need to buy or manage the underlying hardware, software, provisioning and hosting.

Example: Website hosting on cloud. The vCloud layer will build on top of VMware vSphere by extending the robust virtual infrastructure capabilities to facilitate delivery of infrastructure service via cloud computing without compromising the performance.

Have a look at the below image closely. This layer will be your typical VMware vSphere setup. These virtual datacenters and VM access will be given to the cloud end user based on the requirement. We need to go one more level deeper than above image to understand the vCloud setup. In vCloud , we can create a number of virtual datacenter based on service level.