This was a pretty advanced session about the vCloud Director, which is a complex product. The speakers were very, very good, but given the advanced nature of the discussion it will be hard to recap the session in full and some of the concepts need more explanation than I can provide here. But that being said, here are some of the highlights:
- Value of chargeback for an organization: accurate TCO/ROI analysis, accountability
- vCloud architecture
- Horizontal scaling
- Multi-tenancy
- Limit single points of failure in the architecture
- Leverages load balancers
- You must make the database highly available or the whole vCD management subsystem goes offline, although existing VMs will continue to run.
- A vCD architecture is pretty complex and hard to wrap your head around
- Typically you setup a dedicated management cluster that runs the vCD infrastructure like vCD, AD/DNS, vCenter, SQL, etc.
- Resource groups are compute resources
- A virtual datacenter is typically divided into a provider vDC which has a single type of compute and storage resource (single tier of storage).
- An organization vDC is an allocation from the PvDC
- vCD has various allocation models which cannot be changed once you instantiate it
- Pay as you go – Dynamic, unpredictable
- Allocation Pool – % of resources, can burst, but pretty predictable. Most common type.
- Reservation pool – Hard caps, not dynamic, cannot burst
- Networking has three layers
- External – Internet access, IP storage, backup servers, etc.
- Organization – Allows vApps to communicate with each other
- vApp – Private network for communications within the vApp
- You can define network pools of various types
- Portgroup backed – Manually create with vCenter
- VLAN backed – Uses the vDS and you give it a range of VLANs to use. v1.5 supports the N1K
- vCloud Network isolation (VCD-NI) – Creates networks on the fly and uses MAC on MAC encapsulation. Need to increase your MTU to 1524. VMware’s secret sauce for multi-tenant isolation.
- New features in vCD 1.5 include:
- Microsoft SQL server (no more Oracle requirements!!)
- vSphere 5.0 support
- Custom guest properties
- Much faster VM provisioning
The take away from this session is that vCD is very powerful, but also very complex. Today most use cases are test/dev and NOT production. The speakers said possibly next year they will see more production usage. vCD is the replacement for lab manager, which was discontinued last year.
