vCloud Operations is focused around two organizing concepts, vCloud Tenant Operations and vCloud Infrastructure Operations, and their relationships with Application Development, the Network Operations Center (NOC), and customers. This is shown in the following figure.

 

In non-vCloud environments, application development is responsible for designing, developing, integrating, and testing a company’s custom applications and databases, and integrating and testing third-party applications. It fills the same role in a vCloud environment. The difference is that the vCloud environment promotes an agile approach to development, coupled with modern, Platform as a Service-based tools and tighter relationship to vCloud Operations (specifically, vCloud Tenant Operations). This relationship is discussed in Section 5.3, vCloud Tenant Operations. Multiple Application Development teams can interact with vCloud Tenant Operations.

For vCloud computing, the design guideline for the Network Operations Center (NOC) is to become a center for proactive vCloud monitoring, event management, and remediation. From an organizational perspective, the requirement is to add vCloud-specific subject matter experts (SMEs) and begin migrating Tier 2 support responsibilities to the NOC. Instrumenting the NOC with purpose-built vCloud management tools is critical to achieving this. The NOC interacts with vCloud Tenant Operations and vCloud Infrastructure Operations for Tier 3 support as needed. This interaction is described in Section 5.2, vCloud Infrastructure Operations and Section 5.3, vCloud Tenant Operations.

vCloud Tenant Operations is responsible for managing end-customer organization relationships, governing, developing, releasing, provisioning, and operationally managing the services offered on the vCloud computing infrastructure. Organizationally, it represents the vCloud Service Control layer of the vCloud Operations Framework, and the vCloud Operations Control layer as it relates to the offered services. Service offerings can include applications provided by an Application Development team.

vCloud Infrastructure Operations is responsible for architecting, engineering, deploying, and operationally managing the underlying logical and physical vCloud computing infrastructure.