Service Providers typically offer one or more availability levels to their customers based upon the nature of the solution, customer requirements, and price point of the service. Secondary or “disaster recovery” solutions might be designed with single points of failure to minimize the cost of a service the customer does not plan to use, or to rely on, often. The designs for primary or “active” sites often include reducing the risk of a single device failure affecting service by using infrastructure elements in pairs. These pairs operate in high availability (HA) mode where one device will take over seamlessly in the event of a failure of the other device. However, HA cannot mitigate against site wide outages, such as those caused by major power outages or other environmental issues. To deal with the potential loss of a service location, often as a requirement imposed by business insurers, services must be delivered from multiple, geographically separate locations. Introducing multiple geographic locations to a customer’s service presents the challenge of providing the customer with the opportunity to manage services in multiple locations while not overcomplicating the customer experience.

Previously, Cloud Providers have used customized portals to offer a single “frontend” to multiple, disparate services. This typically requires investing significant resources into realizing the benefits of the underlying platforms through their portals. Often these portals use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on the underlying products, but must then represent the capabilities of the products’ user interface (UI) within that of the portal. VMware vCloud Director® is a product with a comprehensive API that has been used by Cloud Providers to differentiate, add value, and present multiple, disparate vCloud Director instances through a single portal’s UI.

With the introduction of vCloud Director v9.0, Cloud Providers can now offer access to multiple, independent vCloud Director instances through a single point of access. Because of the distributed nature of this access, Cloud Providers can choose to offer a single, global access point, or, should they prefer, several, regional access points which each in turn offer access to, and management of, multiple vCloud Director instances.