Willem van Engeland (VMware) and Duncan Epping (VMware, Yellow Bricks) did a presentation on vCloud Director.

Paul Maritz said earlier: Cloud-based infrastructure will become the new hardware”, shifting from running your applications on HP, IBM or Dell hardware to Terremark. With vCloud Director you can create your own cloud: public, private or hybrid. VMware published a vCloud API which contains:

  • vApp upload & download
  • inventory listing
  • vApp operations
  • catalog management
  • task management

vCloud Director is built for scalability. It is tested on 10.000 VMs in a vCloud Director cell, which can contain 25 vCenter servers.

People often ask: It looks a lot like Lab Manager, what gives? The answer is: It goes beyond Lab Manager. scalability is way beyond LM and multi-tenancy is present and more important in the vCloud Director (vCloud API)

When looking into vCloud Director you have two parts:

  • Provider vDC. This can be either a cluster or a resource pool. It is used to define an SLA (eg. bronze, silver, gold levels). storage tiering, HA redundancy, specific hardware etc.
  • organization vDC which is essentially a logical container for resources for the organization. It is used to define how resources are allocated.

In the demo Duncan demonstrates what you get when you login as an administrator. It gives an overview about the Cloud cells, provider vDCs, external networks etc. This will be used as a provider to create resources for organizations. In a the time it took Duncan to explain what you can do with vCloud Director he created an organizational vDC. End users can start deploying VMs/application within hours instead of months.

Also creating a vApp with vCloud Director for an end user (organization or department) is pretty straightforward. You create a VM based on a profile, give it memory, CPU and disk space. You can create separate networks for for example to communicate between the database server and the web front-end, without exposing the database server to the internet.

Willem gives a short lists of use cases for private clouds:

  • development and test;
  • pre-production;
  • demos;
  • training;
  • tier 2 and tier 3 applications (of course it IS for tier 1 applications, but companies will most probably will use it for their tier 2 and 3 applications first).

All in all: if you want to reduce the operational hassle and cost that goes with that, check out vCloud Director.