Cloud computing is aggressively driving efficiencies in processes, compliance, and innovation in applications, and optimizing the infrastructure on which they run. Requirements vary according to who consumes the services. Application owners want the simplicity and agility to deploy platforms for development in the cloud. The platforms are fully configured environments that meet internal enterprise compliance requirements. Infrastructure owners want the ability to create self-service models for application owners.

Virtualization has matured to a point where virtual machines can be deployment in a matter of hours where it once took weeks to provision physical servers. When all levels of control are in place, vCloud Director provisions solutions in minutes with self-service portal capabilities and integration with third-party provisioning systems using vCloud APIs.

vFabric Application Director furthers the deployment of applications in the cloud. Major challenges that vFabric Application Director addresses are the following:

In legacy deployments, there is little or no automation. Complex dependencies might or might not be abstracted. Maintaining those abstractions can increase overhead. The deployments might not be cloud aware, might have tighter dependency on the cloud infrastructure, and might not be flexible enough to meet developer needs in timely manner.

Permutation and combination of application and guest operating system versions in vApp templates have increased. This introduces enormous challenges on administrators to standardize configurations, security, and compliance.

Applications after their deployments are not automatically discovered by monitoring systems. This leads to long troubleshooting cycles, and capacity planning processes with little or no auto-scaling capabilities for applications.

vFabric Application Director addresses many of these shortcomings. It has an architecture, model-based application deployment, integrated active application monitoring and management, and provisioning to public, private, and hybrid clouds.