VMware vCloud Director 101: A Complete Overview

VMware vCloud Director is a provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). vCloud Director goes by a number of different names resembling VMware Cloud Director, VM Cloud Director, and VCD. With it, you’ll be able to create virtual data centers in software. 

Your virtual data centers are made up of multiple ESXi hosts. With these hosts, you’ll be able to allocate pools of resources and split them up amongst different customers, departments, and your various virtual data centers.

VCD allows service providers to simplify, reorganize, and group their virtual machine hosts into multi-tenant virtual data centers. These virtual data centers bring with them easy-to-use, self-service, and automation-friendly control panels. These virtual data centers are split into various organizations, which will be further split up into groups and managed with permissions.

Firms are assigned their very own organization/virtual data center where they will provision their vApps (collections of preconfigured VMs that mix operating systems with applications), virtual machines (VMs), and virtual storage. They’ll arrange virtual networks with routers, switches, and firewalls. 

Service providers profit from fewer management tickets, and customers profit from with the ability to easily make changes on the fly. 

vSphere accesses your ESXi hosts running directly on the physical hardware. From there, you’ll be able to make virtual machines or vApps. You’ll be able to adjust resources so as to add or remove things like RAM, CPU, or hard disk space. Because vSphere works at a lower level, that is where you’d add things like ESXi hosts, clusters, and virtual switches.

vCloud Director operates on a better level and is an abstraction of vSphere and the hardware that it controls. VCD means that you can create virtual data centers. vSphere, as a substitute, allows you to create virtual machines in traditional data centers. 

Not do customers should raise tickets to regulate their virtual hardware. They’ll construct recent VMs, switches, and networks as needed inside their virtual data center. 

This permits organizations to create and deploy multiple software-defined data centers (SDDCs) from a single set of physical resources. Storage, compute and network resources can all be allocated to vApps and virtual machines dynamically and managed on the organizational level. These resources are secured by isolated virtual resources and role-based authentication.

VMware vCloud Director allows you to manage your various data centers from multiple locations through a single user interface. It has reporting and monitoring to make sure services are running easily.

Each VMware VCD and VMware vSphere will be expanded in functionality through their extensibility frameworks. You’ll be able to add your individual or use one among many ISV (Independent Software Vendors) built for them These custom solutions span multiple industries. VCD and vSphere span multiple industries including backup, cloud, DRaaS, and security.

In an uncertain world where systems fail, recovery is critical to any organization. DDraaS is a strong addition to vCloud Director that permits disaster recovery and data protection as a service.

Enable easy lift and shift migrations with the VMware VCD Availability plugin. With this, customers can perform self-service cold or warm migrations with ease. Cold migrations are when a VM is powered off through the migration, while a warm migration is when the VM is lively through the migration. 

You’ll be able to clone your infrastructure so you might have a test and production environment. Every part from the VMs, networks, switches, and routers would all be cloned directly. This helps with rapid deployments and migrations. 

With vCloud Director, you not should open tickets to create virtual machines or manage your infrastructure or use complicated automation scripts. With the VCD Administrator power user, you’ll be able to make these changes as needed. vCloud Director enables automation through some extent and click on interface. Behind the scenes, vCloud Director generates a script and vSphere executes the script. This not only simplifies automation, but it surely also brings with it recent sorts of automation that may not otherwise be possible. The VMware template feature can also be very handy allowing you to rapidly deploy virtual machines.

You’ll be able to service your customer’s needs by creating applications for vCloud Director that reach its capabilities. There are also a bunch of already built applications for vCloud Director available on the VMware Cloud Marketplace. They’re certified to be compatible and able to use.

VCD will be used for value-added resellers who construct their very own data centers virtually in software after which sell the assorted virtual machines to finish users. It could possibly even be useful for service providers in allowing customers to self-service their infrastructure.

Multi-tenancy infrastructure will be managed, cloned, and automatic through an easy-to-use interface. Self-service virtual data centers are secure, isolated, and simple to make use of. Finally, monitoring of your VDC allows for efficient allocation of resources as they’re needed by various vApps and virtual machines.

Self-service data centers allow for extreme monetization. Your customers can trigger workflows that automate the constructing of VMs and network devices of their data center. The reselling potential of knowledge centers and VMs inside that data center is phenomenal. Many firms integrate virtualization into their systems by hiring developers to construct a management platform. 

vCloud Director is built for growth. You’ll be able to clone data centers or configurations and deploy them to multiple customers. Ensure these deployed systems stay secure with Next Generation Firewalls capable of protect all layers of the TCP stack. With tools just like the NSX Distributed Firewall and other NSX tools, not only are you able to filter packets, you’ll be able to inspect the information within the packets and protect against malware and advanced attacks. Also, load balance your workflows and construct your VMware clusters out as needed.

HIPAA compliance could be very vital within the healthcare industry. vCloud Director means that you can segment and isolate your data in a secure manner. Departments will be separated out and guarded behind firewalls. You can even set policies and implement them and control who has access to what. Multi-hospital organizations can make the most of VCD’s cloning ability to clone entire infrastructures from one hospital or location to a different.

Because the world moves towards online learning, the necessity to access your data anywhere on any device and securely is increasingly vital. Use vCloud Director to totally embrace cloud computing and rapidly grow and alter as needed. Not are you anchored to clunky server rooms running outdated software which might be hard to establish and maintain. As your classroom changes, VMware is correct there to alter with you. 

Engineers can use vCloud Director to check data or to construct and run simulations in a test environment on a test database. From there, you’ll be able to scale up your test environment and database to production scale and test with real-world load levels. If all the things works as intended, you’ll be able to then deploy with confidence, knowing that all the things will work flawlessly.

vCloud Director helps the financial sector on two fronts. First, VCD helps you secure your money with tools like segmentation, user roles, encryption, isolation, and Next Generation Firewalls.

On one other front, vCloud Director helps you along with your databases. As it’s possible you’ll know, databases are the cornerstone of the financial sector. Not only are you able to scale your databases and database servers as needed, but you may also keep all of them separated and arranged on their very own virtual servers.

Automation got its start within the automotive industry with the assembly line. vCloud Director takes it to the subsequent level. The automotive industry has many parts to it the availability chain, engineering, safety, and marketing segments of the business. All of those segments have rapidly changing needs and demands. vCloud Director can scale and adapt to satisfy this demand. Moreover, your can automate and rapidly deploy recent projects as recent cars are released. Through automating and cloning, you’ll be able to be certain that things are stable, secure, and cling to industry standards.

Use the feature comparison below to see how VMware vCloud Director compares against Nutanix Calm and Cisco UCS Director: 

Deep integration with Cisco devices definitely gives Cisco UCS an edge over VCD. Nevertheless, vCloud Director makes up for it with its extensibility. You’ll be able to add your individual Cisco integrations or integrations with other apps and services with VCD. Moreover, you’ve got got vCloud virtual routers, switches, and firewalls, which will be cloned and replicated in a multi-tenant environment. With traditional Cisco hardware, you’ll be able to’t clone hardware setups. That is something you’ll be able to only do in a virtual environment with vCloud Director.

VCloud’s extensibility is powerful. Not only are you able to add features and plugins, but you may also customize vCloud Director for your corporation. Beyond that, you’ll be able to segment your corporation units and supply role-based access in a multi-tenant environment. Nutanix Calm’s strength is machine learning. With that, it may well enable predictive capability planning. This helps to higher optimize your infrastructure.

It’s time to decide on: Do you follow the single-tenant vSphere or upgrade to multi-tenancy with vCloud Director?

Dedicated VMware performs higher because there aren’t any resources shared and means that you can customize more of your environment. If this sounds good to you, you need to try our Private Cloud powered by VMware.
Alternatively, there’s vCloud Director, which is a multi-tenancy platform. It brings with it cost savings with higher resource sharing. VCD’s easy interface allows self-service of your infrastructure, and automation makes maintenance a breeze. If this sounds good to you, try our Multi-Tenant VMware Private Cloud, which is powered by vCloud Director.