VMware Cloud Director: An Introduction

VMware Cloud Director is an abstraction layer that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to convert software-defined and physical data centers into elastic virtual data centres providing infrastructure as a service platform that is multi-tenant, elastic and secure.

At Rackspace, we’ve enjoyed the many benefits VMware Cloud Director brings as it has allowed us to engineer a VMware-based cloud solution that delivers some amazing customer benefits once thought not possible on VMware. In this series over the next few weeks, I’ll provide an overview of some of the key features of VMware Cloud Director and our learnings. The series will cover the following topics so be sure to check back for new posts.

Topics Covered

• VCD Overview
• VCD Autoscaling
• VCD Terraform interaction
• VCD Tanzu integration
• VCD 3.0 New Features
• VCD Storage Policies
• VCD VCF Integration

Overview of VMware Cloud Director

VMware Cloud Director is an abstraction layer that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to convert software-defined and physical data centres into elastic virtual data centres providing infrastructure as a service platform that is multi-tenant, elastic and secure. This approach provides pooling of resources (CPU, Memory, Storage, Networking) and allows for self-service provisioning. VMware Cloud Director fits different cloud deployment models and can be used to build private clouds where resources are internal only, public clouds where resources are offered externally and Hybrid clouds which is a composition of two or more interoperable clouds. 

Key Value Points 

vCloud Director delivers key benefits to both the cloud provider and the consumer. Some are listed below: 

• Reduced time to market to deliver services. 
• Ability to monetize on native VMware-based services and custom services integrated from external software vendors.
• Ability to scale down and up based on demand.
• Resource pooling with a range of tenancy options
• Operational efficiency 
• Ability to automate 
• Support for cloud-native applications 

More Services

While VMware Cloud Director is a best-in-class platform for delivering infrastructure, most MSPs would like to move beyond infrastructure and focus on delivering higher value services (which represent 80% of customer spend after all) and move from IaaS to a PaaS model with services like DR, Backup, Monitoring, K8s, Security, and Professional Services. VMware Cloud Director provides the framework for extension services that enable cloud providers to publish services including from third-party vendors.

How does it work?

VMware Cloud Director isn’t vSphere, It introduces various new terminologies and concepts that are quite different, and it also requires a new way of thinking to manage and operate. In the next few articles, we will go through VMware Cloud Director core concepts and various day 2 operations so stay tuned!