This white paper examines the choices available to a VMware Cloud Provider offering service from multiple vCloud Director v9.0 platforms. It looks at the design philosophy behind multisite operation in vCloud Director, examining the principles which have led to the capabilities in the latest release of the product and which will shape multisite capabilities in future releases. The document discusses the options for grouping workload platforms behind vCloud Director instances, and grouping those instances behind a single customer access point. It examines the configuration required to group instances together at the Cloud Provider and Tenant levels, considers authentication and authorization enhancements and requirements, and looks at new infrastructure requirements to support multisite capabilities.

Multisite configurations in vCloud Director v9.0 rely extensively on the vCloud Director API. An understanding of both the API structure, REST, and the XML responses the API typically returns is assumed for the sections of this document which cover those topics. A deep knowledge of those areas is not assumed or required for the rest of this document. The multisite elements incorporated in the new vCloud Director HTML5 UI are examined, but the migration of existing elements of the previous UI are out of scope of this document