Better and more uniform usage and management of distributed resources – Many customers and service providers want to build one single vCloud that contains resources that are distributed across cities, countries and continents. That is the way they operate their IT. They prefer to install and operate one vCloud out of the box rather than building two or more vCloud instances that would require additional integration.

The second use case is similar to the first, but the business driver is different. Though there are customers and service providers that distribute resources because that is how they operate as a global company, there are situations where they (specifically, service providers) require that the resources are distributed in various countries and geographies. This is due to data regulations and compliance requirements, and because their customers cannot take their assets outside of a certain country or geography. In this case, service providers must distribute locations where they are selling their services. These service providers want to manage these datacenters under the same single vCloud umbrella.

The third use case is a variant of the first two use cases and it is specific to service providers. Many service providers are interested in offering vCloud services to their customers where the service is managed centrally on a shared management platform, but it is delivered at the customer premise, where a dedicated physical environment is deployed. This may be done for various reasons, from security and compliance to network requirements. Think about a customer subscribing to a public vCloud service where the service provider assigns an entire provider virtual datacenter to that organization and that provider virtual datacenter happens to be physically deployed at the customer premises.

The fourth use case involves public or private service providers that have vCloud consumers distributed across the globe and want to guarantee the lowest possible latency and best possible experience. The best way to achieve this is to move the user workloads and the systems where they run physically as close as possible to the consumer. These service providers also want to manage these resources as a single vCloud.

The fifth use case is to provide a mechanism to allow end users to consume resources that are physically distributed in different locations for increased resiliency. In scenarios where the resiliency of the end-user workload is managed at the application level, the end users can instantiate loosely coupled virtual machines in standalone provider virtual datacenters distributed at remote locations, thus achieving scalability and resiliency. In this case, the end user is responsible for managing the resiliency of the application.

The sixth use case enables a vCloud provider to increase resiliency of end-user workloads by failing them over to different sites if anything fails at the datacenter where the workload is originally instantiated. In this scenario, application resiliency is achieved through recovery mechanisms implemented at the infrastructure level, not at the application level. This is a resiliency service that the vCloud administrator offers to the end user regardless of the application resiliency attributes.