Various distributed scenarios can enable vCloud capacity to be spread across different premises located around the world. Some of the distributed design options lead to resiliency advantages. Others may be prerequisites for DR scenarios (however, these, are more of an implicit outcome of distributing the compute farm rather than an explicit design goal).

Creating a distributed vCloud model is foundationally required, but is not sufficient to address high availability and disaster recovery for vCloud workloads. The focus of this section is on how to distribute resources, not how to make workloads highly available on those resources.