To provide an appropriate level of service depending on the vCloud customers’ requirements, services should be further differentiated by their corresponding service levels. These service levels can be defined by offering availability and recoverability attributes such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and incident response times. These attributes can be applied to the different components within the service catalog.

It is possible to design for different service levels for the virtual machines contained in a vApp. For example, a vApp could contain multiple web servers to provide resilience in the event of server failure, and thus a lower RTO for the service.

Virtual datacenters provide abstracted physical and virtual resources. Different service levels can be defined by using (or not using) the underlying hardware technology (server capabilities, storage array technologies, storage protocols, replication, others) and virtualization technology (HA, DRS, VMware vSphere vMotion®, and others).

Combined, vApps and the capabilities of the virtual datacenters on which they can be deployed offer the ability to create a powerful and extensive vCloud service catalog.