VMware vCloud Director

What is VMware vCloud Director?

VMware vCloud Director is a software solution that enables enterprises to build secure, multi-tenant private clouds by pooling infrastructure resources into virtual data centres and exposing them to users through Web-based portals and programmatic interfaces as fully automated, catalogue-based services.

By building secure and cost-effective private clouds with VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director, internal IT organisations can act as true service providers for the businesses they support, driving innovation and agility while increasing IT efficiency and enhancing security. This solution provides a pragmatic path to cloud computing by giving customers the power to leverage existing investments and the flexibility to extend capacity between clouds

How Does VMware vCloud Director Work?

VMware vCloud Director enables IT organisations to deliver resources to internal users as virtual data centres. By logically pooling compute, storage, and networking capacity into virtual data centres, IT organisations can manage resources more efficiently with complete abstraction between consumption and delivery of IT services. Instead of providing users or organisations with siloed physical infrastructures, IT teams can deliver isolated virtual data centres that draw resources from a common physical infrastructure. By pooling these physical resources on the back end, hardware utilisation and consolidation increases. Similarly, underlying infrastructure can be pooled into tiers and offered to users at distinct service levels and prices.

How is VMware vCloud Director Used?

In this new model, IT organisations become cloud service providers for the business, achieving the benefits of cloud computing without sacrificing security or control. Users experience unprecedented responsiveness and agility, and IT management can reduce costs through increased consolidation, task automation, and simplified administration. All this is achieved cost-effectively while leveraging existing investments in people and technology.

VMware vCloud Director integrates with existing VMware vSphere deployments and supports existing and future applications by providing elastic standard storage and networking interfaces, such as Layer-2 connectivity and broadcasting between virtual machines. VMware vCloud Director utilises open standards to preserve deployment flexibility and pave the way to the hybrid cloud. Through partnerships with a broad ecosystem of service providers offering cloud services based on VMware vCloud Director, customers can extend their data centre capacity to include secure and compatible public clouds and manage them as easily as their own private cloud.

Key Features

• Create virtual data centres - Virtual data centres are logical constructs that include compute, storage, and networking capacity to enable complete abstraction between the consumption of infrastructure services and the underlying resources.
• Support multi-tenant environments - Administrators can group users into organisations that can represent any policy group, such as a business unit, division, or subsidiary company. Each has isolated virtual resources, independent LDAPauthentication, specific policy controls, and unique catalogues. These features enable secure multi-tenancy and safe sharing of infrastructure.
• vShield security technologies - Integrated vShield Edge technologies such as perimeter protection, port-level firewalling, network address translation and DHCP services, offer virtualisation-aware security, simplify application deployment, and enforce boundaries required by compliance standards. Upgrading to the full vShield Edge solution adds advanced services such as site-to-site VPN, network isolation,and Web load balancing.
• Infrastructure service catalogue - Users are empowered to deploy and consume pre-configured infrastructure and application services, such as virtual appliances, virtual machines, operating system images, and other media with the click of a button from central catalogues. This enables IT teams to standardise offerings, simplifying troubleshooting, patching, and change management.
• Self-service portal - Users get direct access to their catalogues and virtual data centres through a user-friendly Web portal.
• VMware vCloud API and Open Virtualisation Format - The vCloud API is an open, REST-based API that allows scripted access to consume cloud resources, such as vApp upload/download, catalogue management, and other operations. The vCloud API makes basic transfer between clouds possible using the open virtualisation format (OVF), which preserves application properties, networking configuration, and other settings.
• Automation and orchestration - Leveraging the APIs in conjunction with the VMware vCenter™ Orchestrator plug-in and integrations with other orchestration and service management software, administrators can automate routine tasks, build ITIL workflows, and script complex operations with ease.

find out more

For more information, contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk