Overview
VMware vCloud Director (vCD) is a software product that provides the ability to build
secure, multi-tenant clouds by pooling virtual infrastructure resources into virtual
datacenters and exposing them to users through Web-based portals and programmatic interfaces
as a fully-automated, catalog-based service.
vCloud Director relies on vSphere resources to provide CPU and memory to run virtual
machines. In addition, vSphere datastores provide storage for virtual machine files
and other files necessary for virtual machine operations. vCloud Director also
utilizes vSphere distributed switches and vSphere port groups to support virtual
machine networking.
vSphere resources are used to create cloud resources. Cloud resources are an
abstraction of their underlying vSphere resources. They provide the compute and
memory resources for vCloud Director virtual machines and vApps. Cloud resources
also provide access to storage and network connectivity. Cloud resources include
provider and organization virtual datacenters, external networks, organization vDC
networks, and network pool.
vCloud Director introduces a number of
logical components to support the notion of a VDC and multi-tenancy that is
presented to end users. The following are the main logical components:
Provider Virtual
Datacenter
: A provider VDC is a logical grouping of compute and
storage resources. The provider VDC groups together a set of vSphere hosts and a set
of one or more associated datastores. This logical grouping is then made available
for consumption by organizations.Organizations
: One
of the key capabilities of a vCloud Director private cloud is secure multitenancy.
The organization concept is one of the key building blocks of this. A vCloud
Director organization is a unit of administration that represents a Collection of
users and user groups. An organization also serves as a security boundary, because
users from a particular organization have visibility only to other users and
resources allocated to that organization. Organization Virtual
Datacenter
: An organization VDC is a logical grouping of resources
from one or more provider VDCs that an organization is allowed to access. Depending
on back-end (provider VDC) configuration and needs of the organization, one or more
sets of resources backed by different provider VDCs might be present. This enables
different performance, SLA or cost options to be available to organization users
when deploying a workload.vApps
: A VMware
vSphere vApp is an abstraction that encapsulates all of the virtual machine and
internetworking needs of an application. vApps can be as simple as a single virtual
machine or as complex as a multitier business application. Templates can be created
from a vApp to enable one to be easily redeployed multiple times by an
organization’s users. The Server Manager provides vCloud
Director management support for the following:
- vCloud Director components discovery using REST API
- Association of vCD components with the virtual infrastructure discovered through vCenter and NSX.
- Root-cause and Impact analysis.