Private vCloud networking requirements tend to vary depending on the primary use cases driving the project. Enterprises that act as service providers to their internal customers tend to have comparable network requirements to that of a public vCloud. Enterprises that use vCloud for development or pre-production environments have different requirements.

Enterprises commonly require direct connections from inside the vCloud environment into the networking backbone. This is analogous to “extending a wire” from the network switch that contains the network or VLAN to be used all the way through the vCloud layers into the vApp. Each organization in the private vCloud has an internal organization virtual datacenter network and a direct connect external organization virtual datacenter network.

 

At least one external network is required for external organization virtual datacenter networks to access resources outside of vCloud Director—the Internet for public vCloud deployments, and an internal (local) network for private vCloud deployments.

To establish this network, use the New External Network wizard and specify external network settings and static IP address ranges. For the static IP address pool, a good starting range is 30 reserved IP addresses for static assignment.