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.
- 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.
