8. Multisite Considerations
Initial vCloud Director deployments were targeted at traditional test and development, scale-out infrastructure, and tier-3 workloads where advanced infrastructure features were typically not required. As customers started to adopt vCloud Director for a different set of workloads, a new set of requirements arose. One of these requirements is the ability to deploy vCloud Director to manage resources that span more than a single site.
NoteMultisite hybrid vCloud scenarios (defined as a combination of private and public cloud resources) are not discussed.
This section provides guidelines and discusses various options, limitations, and supported scenarios to deploy vCloud Director in a distributed scenario, that focuses on a specific vCloud distributed model. The goal is to take a private or public vCloud instance and describe the options for stretching it across multiple locations—this model takes a single vCloud Director instance with two or more vCloud Director cells and determines how the different components can be deployed separately in different locations. From a vCloud Director perspective this is considered a single vCloud. The following figure illustrates this concept.
Figure 44: Single vCloud, Multiple Sites
There are additional models that enable enterprise customers and service providers to create a single vCloud that spans multiple remote sites. One of the alternative models is to deploy traditional vCloud Director instances in each of the available locations and layer an additional level of management on top of them to create a single entry point into dispersed vCloud instances. This additional layer can be implemented with an additional software layer such as VMware vCloud Automation Center. The following figure illustrates this concept.
Figure 45: Multiple vCloud Instances Tied Together
