VMware vCloud Director gives customers the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase data center efficiency and business agility. Coupled with vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing data centers by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services.

Many of the limitations discussed in this paper regarding secure access control, isolation, and operational efficiency are addressed through the use of vCloud Director. For instance, as highlighted previously, sharing host resources across tenants provides a number of challenges from a secure tenant isolation perspective, as well as a resource management and service assurance point of view. These are the challenges that vCloud Director for Service Providers is designed to resolve. In addition, vCloud Director offers end consumers simple self-service and consumption of advanced network services (offered by NSX) through the vCloud Director user interface and API.

 

vCloud Director provides secure separation because administrators can group users into organizations that can represent any policy group, such as a business unit, division, or subsidiary company. Each group has isolated virtual resources, independent LDAP authentication, specific policy controls, and unique catalogs.

These features enable a multitenant environment with multiple organizations sharing the same infrastructure. Visibility and resource control are restricted to each organization virtual data center (VDC).

When employing vCloud Director, tenant management and control is provided by a self-service portal, which provides direct access to individual tenant catalogs and virtual data centers. Tenants consume resources as a catalog-based service through a web portal and programmatic interfaces.

By standardizing processes, increasing automation, and delivering IT as a service through vCloud Director, it is possible to achieve additional savings beyond virtualization, while significantly reducing the required hands-on operational maintenance of the shared vCenter Server model. In addition, standardizing service offerings can simplify IT management tasks such as troubleshooting, patching, and change management. Administrative maintenance can be eliminated and provisioning can be automated through policy-based workflows that allow authorized users to deploy preconfigured services when they need them.

vCloud Director offers a number of benefits over the shared vCenter Server model discussed in this paper. However, there is no correct or incorrect way of offering end consumers the services and resources they require to conduct their day-to-day business. In fact, one of the key differentiators for VMware Cloud Providers is that many simply focus on the services their customers want to access, and help them build their businesses based on that trusted relationship.