This document examines the way familiar customer topologies can be replicated within a VMware Cloud Provider’s offering using the capabilities of NSX, controlled through vCloud Director. While this document focuses on the architecture of a service provider’s multitenant environment, it starts with the evolution of a managed service customer’s topology into that of a cloud service customer. Having established a simple, illustrative customer topology, this document then explores the way this topology is implemented on the underlying infrastructure, and then offers example topologies for separating multiple customers within both the virtualized world and that of the larger data center and its external connectivity.

While vCloud Director requires its own supporting network environment and configuration to provision compute workloads, those areas are outside the scope of this document. Because of this, a degree of familiarity is assumed with both vCloud Director and NSX. For more information on architecting and operating a vCloud Director solution, see Section 7, References. Similarly, while the infrastructure topology of access networks used by service providers to manage tenant workloads, applications and services follow similar models to those explored for customer networking, the specific challenges of providing management access to tenant networks is out of scope for this document.

This document is designed to assist service provider infrastructure architects tasked with the design of tenant networking within the data center environment. Its goal is to also assist service provider customer solution architects with the pre- or post-sale design of customer environments within a vCloud Director powered cloud service.