You are looking to offer a public or private cloud within your organization or externally to businesses.

In this recipe, we will discuss the vCloud Director and how it can impact your business.

The vCloud Director works by taking pools of datacenter resources, including storage, networking, and compute resources, and creating virtual datacenters that operate independently of each other. This creates a highly secure and encapsulated environment, allowing multiple users or customers to create an infrastructure without having to invest or manage physical resources. The vCloud Director integrates with existing the vSphere 4 and 5 deployments and takes advantage of DRS, DVS, and HA.

The vCloud Director leverages an open standard, the vCloud API, to let developers outside of VMware build on the platform and automate processes that fit their business requirements. Additionally, vCloud Director uses open visualization format (OVF), which allows administrators and developers to create and package specific workloads across their cloud infrastructures.

Consuming resources via the vCloud Director is simple. End users have access to a web portal and API interface, allowing customers to use resources in multiple ways. This permits service providers to offer pay-as-you-go models, along with fixed resource consumption models, giving the end user additional flexibility. Resources can be monitored and charged back to the end user via the vCenter Chargeback application. This ensures accurate reporting of resources for billing purposes.

Some of the highlighted features of the vCloud Director include:

The vCloud Director has multiple uses: it can be used in an organization for service providers, for developers, or within an organization to allow different business divisions to manage their own infrastructure. In this chapter we’ll look at the requirements for the vCloud Director as well as requirements for deploying the vCloud Evaluation deployment appliance.

Figure 8-1 shows how the vCloud Director organizes the various vSphere resources and offers them to users. The following three resources are abstracted from the vSphere layer into the vCloud Director Cell, and then presented to the end user in the form of a virtual datacenter. Thus, end users can deploy new computing resources within their own secure environments.

Figure 8-1. vCloud architecture (credit: vmware.com)

A virtual datacenter consists of two different types of organization units that represent how resources are allocated to the virtual datacenter.

Organizations use catalogs to store vApp templates and media files, such as ISO or OS images. Members of the organizations have access to the catalog and can use the resources inside that catalog to deploy new vApps that encompass the virtual machines.

vApps are encapsulated containers that represent all of the virtual machine and networking components of a specific application. vApps can be simple deployments such as a single server or as a complex multitier web appliance. Templates can be created from the vApps to be used for easily deploying additional resources within the organization.

Key benefits of deploying the vCloud Director include:

When upgrading or considering upgrading to the vCloud Director 1.5 what to expect.

This recipe highlights new features in the vCloud Director 1.5.

As you look at upgrading from vCloud Director 1.0, consider some of the features and enhancements that will be available to you:

You need to find the maximum configurations for the vCloud Director.

Use this recipe to determine the maximum configurations for a vCloud Director deployment.

The supported maximums inside a vCloud Director deployment are listed in Table 8-1. This is important information because the vCloud Director deployments are designed and put into production.

You wish to install vCloud Director in your environment.

Use this section as a reference for the installation requirements, to ensure your installation runs smoothly.

Some specific requirements and guidelines must be followed to deploy the vCloud Director successfully. In this recipe we take a look at the basic requirements of, and some restrictions on the vSphere configuration. Additional detailed information can be found in the vCloud Director Install and Configure Guide available at the following location http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vcd_15_install.pdf

To deploy vCloud Director, you must create an environment inside of vSphere that adheres to the following restrictions:

The vCloud Director can run on vCenter 4.0 Update 2, vCenter 4.0 Update 3, vCenter 4.1, vCenter 4.1 Update 1, and vCenter 5.0. vCenter 5.0 is required if you want Fast Provisioning, Hardware Version 8, or VPN support.

The vCloud Director supports the following versions of ESXi/ESX: ESXi/ESX 4.0 Update 1, ESXi/ESX 4.0 Update 2, ESXi/ESX 4.1, ESXi/ESX4.1 Update 1, and ESXi/ESX 5.0. ESXi/ESX 5.0 is required if you want Fast Provisioning, Hardware Version 8, or VPN support.

The vCloud Director has several impacts on your network because the environment will be shared among multiple users. Tables 8-6 and 8-7 summarize the network requirements needed by the vCloud Director.

Outgoing network ports should not be connected to the public and the external facing networks. These ports are used for internal traffic between the vCloud Director and the ESX/ESXi hosts.

For additional requirements outside the scope of this recipe, please refer to the vCloud Director Install and Configuration Guide.

You wish to evaluate the vCloud infrastructure without deploying an actual live environment.

Follow the steps in this recipe to deploy the evaluation appliance.

VMware has made it easy for organizations to test the vCloud without making a large commitment of time and infrastructure. Customers looking to rapidly test and evaluate a vCloud environment can use the appliance released for that purpose in an Open Virtualization Appliance (.ova) format. Although the appliance includes a preconfigured Oracle XE database along with CentOS, please keep in mind that CentOS is not supported in a production environment.

In this recipe, we will take a look at deploying the vCloud Director Evaluation Appliance.

You need to deploy the vShield Manager in order to configure the vCloud Director and provision organizations.

Deploy the OVA appliance provided by VMware for the vShield Manager.

VMware vShield provides firewall, VPN, routing, and NAT services for the organizations that are deployed within the vCloud Director. Additionally, it creates secure network isolation internally and externally for organizations within the vCloud Director installation.

In this recipe, we will take a look at deploying the vShield Appliance to vCenter Server.

Now vShield Manager is connected to your vCenter interface. This will allow you to proceed with the configuration inside of the vCloud Director interface.

Figure 8-23. Connect vShield to the vCenter server

You have the vCloud Director software installed and need to attach it to the vCenter server so the vCloud Director can assign resources to virtual datacenters.

Attach the vCloud Director instance to the vCenter server.

Attaching a vCenter server allows the resources to be available for use with the vCloud Director. Once attached, resource pools, datastores, and networks can be assigned to a virtual datacenter. In addition to providing the resources for the vCloud Director organizations, the vCenter will also hold the virtual machines and the related files for virtual machines to operate correctly.

You need to create a provider vDC so vCloud Director can allocate resources to organizations.

Enable a provider vDC and register the vSphere resources with the vCloud Director.

Creating a vDC is the first step in allocating resources to the vCloud Director Cell. After you add a provider, storage, compute, and networking resources are presented to the vCloud Director for use. You can create multiple vDCs based on different business scenarios, such as geographic locations and features (HA, storage, compute) that can be allocated to different end users or business depending on their requirements.

You need to assign external networks to the vCloud Director for use within provider vDCs.

Allocate the external networks for the vCloud Director to use.

External networks are a logical network based on vSphere port groups. The external network provides the interface to the Internet for the virtual machines that reside inside different organizational networks. The external network is required if the organization has to connect to the Internet.

You need to add network pools to assign to organizational vDCs for internal network connectivity.

In this recipe, we will look at the steps required to add network pools to the vCloud Director. This will allow internal isolated networks within the vDCs.

Network pools are a group of networks that are available for use within a organizational vDC to create vApp networks and simple or complex network configurations for the vDC. A network pool uses the network resources from vSphere, such as VLAND IDs, port groups, or the vCloud isolated networks. This allows vCloud Director to create NAT-based internal networks, assigning them to vDCs that will later be used in vApps when deploying virtual machines.

Each organization’s vDC can have one network pool. However, multiple organizations can share the same network pool if required, giving additional flexibility within the vDCs.

To get started, follow these steps to add the network resources to the vCloud Director.