It is quite likely that Cloud Service Providers will want to automate much of the provisioning activity associated with onboarding a new tenant, or a tenant to a new site. The organization association process must therefore be scripted using the API flow outlined above. However, it is also possible that the Provider will choose to leave the association process to the customer or might, if they offer multisite association as part of a premium product offering, need to carry out the process as a day-2 activity at some point later in the Tenant lifecycle. Even though the API process can be used to create the association at any time, it might be more convenient for the Provider or customer to be able to complete the association using a GUI in place of the API.

The Administration page of the vCloud Director HTML5 Tenant UI includes a multisite tab which shows current associations and allows the user to set up new associations. In much the same way as the API process, this requires the creation of two unidirectional associations, each formed by retrieving the association data from one organization and sending it to the other. These two actions are represented in the GUI as shown in the following figure.

The Export Local Association Data option sends the organization’s localAssociationData as an XML file for the user to save locally. The Create New Organization Association option opens a dialogue allowing the user to submit the localAssociationData from the remote organization. The dialog is shown in the following figure.

 

The dialog allows the user to either upload the XML file (previously downloaded from the other site to be associated) or simply paste its contents into the XML field directly. Once verified, the dialog allows the user to submit the association data into the local vCloud Director. This process is then repeated within the GUI of the other site to be associated, completing the bidirectional association. After completion, the association is then shown in the Multisite tab in both vCloud Director sites. The following figure shows the association between TestOrg locally in Site-A and its remote peer at Site-B.

By clicking on the association status panel, the user can see the details of the association data and, if they want to, delete the local side of the association. The following figure shows this.