Three components form the VIM functionality in vCloud NFV: the vCenter Server Appliance, the NSX Manager, and the vCloud Director for Service Providers. vCloud Director is the top level VIM component. It leverages the vCenter Server Appliance and the NSX Manager to perform VIM functionality. vCloud Director, vCenter Server Appliance, and the NSX Manager are layered in a hierarchical fashion to facilitate the separation of roles and responsibilities in the CSP networks and to increase overall system resiliency.
VMware vCloud Director
vCloud Director is an abstraction layer that operates on top of the other virtualized infrastructure manager components, vCenter Server and NSX Manager. vCloud Director builds secure, multitenant virtual environments by pooling virtual infrastructure resources into virtual data centers and exposing them to users through Web based portals and programmatic interfaces as fully automated, catalog based services.
A fundamental concept in vCloud Director is that of the tenant. A tenant is a logically isolated construct representing a customer, department, network function, or service, used to deploy VNF workloads. vCloud Director isolates administrative boundaries into NFVI tenants. VNF workload resource consumption is therefore segmented from other VNF workloads, even though the VNFs may share the same resources.
The pooled resources used by vCloud Director are grouped into two abstraction layers:
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Provider Virtual Data Centers. A provider virtual data center (PvDC) combines the compute and memory resources of a single vCenter Server resource pool with the storage resources of one or more datastores available to that resource pool. This construct is the highest in the vCloud Director resource catalog hierarchy.
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Organization Virtual Data Centers. An organization virtual data center (OvDC) provides resources to an NFVI tenant and is partitioned from a provider virtual data center. OvDCs provide an environment where virtual systems can be stored, deployed, and operated. They also provide storage for virtual media such as ISO images, VNF templates, and VNF component templates.
vCloud Director implements the open and publicly available vCloud API, which provides compatibility, interoperability, and programmatic extensibility to network equipment providers (NEPs) and their VNF Managers. The vCloud Director capabilities can be extended to create adaptors to external systems including OSS/BSS.
VMware vCenter Server
The VMware vCenter Server® is the centralized management interface for compute and storage resources in the NFVI. It provides an inventory of allocated virtual to physical resources, manages inventory related information, and maintains an overview of the virtual resource catalogs. vCenter Server also collects data detailing the performance, capacity, and state of its inventory objects. vCenter Server exposes programmatic interfaces to other management components for fine grained control, operation, and monitoring of the underlying virtual infrastructure.
A resource pool is a logical abstraction which aggregates the use of vCenter Server resources. Multiple resource pools, grouped into hierarchies, can be used to partition available CPU and memory resources. The resource pool allows the operator to compartmentalize all resources in a cluster and, if necessary, delegate control over a specific resource pool to other organizations or network functions. The operator can also use resource pools to isolate resources used by one service or function from others.
VMware NSX Manager
The NSX Manager is the primary management plane interface for configuration of network resources within the NFVI. The NSX Manager is responsible for the deployment and management of the virtualized network components, and functions used to support the creation of network services by the VNFs. Such functions include network segments, routing, firewalling, and load balancing, etc.
