What is vCloud Director?
VMware vCloud Director is a software solution for service providers that enables secure cloud environments by pooling 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 Dedicated Machine vs. A Dedicated Resource Pool
‘VMware vCloud Director’ gives administrators the ability to control all aspects of their cloud environment from one single pane of glass. The act of accessing and configuring dedicated (not shared) resources (CPU, RAM, HDD) via an orchestrator with this level of control is known as ‘dedicated resource pooling’.
Quick Comparison – Dedicated VM vs. Dedicated Pool
For me, to fully understand and grasp the idea of ‘dedicated resource pooling’, it helped to compare to the traditional model of ‘Dedicated VMs’ or ‘Dedicated Servers’ that we’re popular during beginning stages of the cloud, and are still relevant for some services today.
Dedicated VM:
- SSH or RDP access into a pre-built virtual machine.
- Created a.k.a ‘spun-up’ for you by the cloud provider.
- Increases or decreases in resources (RAM, HDD, CPU) must be requested, usually via a service ticket.
- Networking, VPNs and Firewalls created and managed by service provider.
- Usually created by a service provider at the hypervisor, allowing the SP to manage multiple clients at once – lowering costs.
- Potentially shared resources – lowering costs.
Dedicated Resource Pooling:
- Create and manage your own virtual machines from a web portal.
- Install your own operating systems etc.
- Network the VMs to the internet and together by creating private vLANS.
- Manage your own Firewalls, VPNs and load balancing.
- Scale the resources to VMs at your own pace.
Benefits of vCloud Director:
- Super-fast provisioning of VMs, Networks, Backups, etc.
- VMware – if you’re even a little familiar with VMware you’ll find the vCloud learning curve a snap.
- VMware – upload existing VMware virtual machines right into the cloud.
- Private and Dedicated resources – no noisy neighbor or over provisioning (aka resource sharing).
- Open API
- Create your own multi-tenant environment using vApp users
- Persistent storage methods
What Does It Look Like?
Here are a few videos I put together to help visualize how simple working with vCloud Director can be.
Spinning up a new VM
Modifying the firewall
Hot scaling resources
Questions?
Feel free to submit any vCloud director or dedicated resource pooling questions in the comments below, We are happy to answer them.
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