Standardization of the service offerings is essential to achieving a scalable, cost efficient vCloud environment. Typically, compute resource-based service offerings (CPU, memory, and storage) are a baseline for vCloud consumption and should be standardized as much as possible regardless of whether they apply to organization virtual datacenters or vApps (and their associated virtual machines).

Compute resources for organization virtual datacenters available in the service catalog should be standardized into various sizes. Additionally, the required compute resource configurations vary depending on the selected VCD allocation model (Allocation Pool, Pay-as-You-Go, or Reservation Pool), because attributes such as CPU speed and CPU or memory guarantee vary. Combining these two components means the service catalog can offer a number of differently sized organization virtual datacenters for each type of allocation model.

Similarly, to create a vApp catalog item (public or organization), there should be as much standardization as possible. Initially, from a compute resource point of view, standard sized virtual machines should be created to enable a pick list of machines for vApp creation. These standardized virtual machines can vary in resource size for CPU, memory and storage; for example, Standard, Standard Plus, Advanced, Premium, and Premium Plus. As a vApp is comprised of one or more individual virtual machines, the appropriately sized virtual machines can be selected from the pick list during the vApp catalog creation process.

In addition to the basic compute offerings of the virtual machines within the vApps, it is necessary to develop the service catalog to include vApp software configurations. These can be basic groupings of compute resources and can be expanded over time to offer more advanced services. Sample vApp offerings are shown in the following table.