VMware Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. vCloud Director Overview

This chapter provides an introduction to vCloud Director (vCD), a layer of vSphere that end users control over the consumption of virtual resources. The vCloud Director allows end users and small and large businesses to reduce or eliminate equipment maintenance and move into a cloud environment, either within an organization or with a service provider using a public or private cloud model. In this chapter, we will take a look at vCloud Director’s requirements and the installation of the vCloud Director evaluation appliance.

What Is vCloud Director?

Problem

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

Solution

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

Discussion

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 ...