Businesses face constant pressure to introduce products and services rapidly into new and existing marketplaces, while users expect services to be easily accessible on demand and to scale with business growth. Management demands these services at a fair price. These pressures and demands all require Information Technology (IT) to become more service-oriented. They also make it more important than ever for IT to improve its strategy to deliver services with the agility that businesses now expect. Cloud computing is central to a better IT strategy.

Virtualization has reduced costs and increased server efficiency, often dramatically, but it does not, by itself, deliver the level of automation and control required to achieve the efficiencies or agility associated with cloud computing. Cloud computing offers the opportunity to further improve cost efficiency, quality of service, and business agility. It enables IT to support a wide range of changing business objectives, from deployment of new tools, products, and services to expansion into new markets. Cloud computing transforms IT from a cost center into a service provider.

The VMware® vCloud® Suite is the VMware solution for cloud computing.

This document provides the information you need to create a service definition for an organization that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources for private, public, and hybrid vCloud instances. The goals of this document are to: