vCloud Director Design
vCloud Director adds a layer of resource abstraction to facilitate multi-tenancy and provide interoperability between clouds built to the vCloud API standard.
• Physical compute, storage, and network resources are passed to the vSphere layer where resource pools, virtual switches, and storage policies are created.
• Resource pools and datastores are then passed up to vCloud Director and attached to provider virtual data centers.
• Pure virtual compute and storage resources are exposed to users through virtual data center constructs. Users consume pure virtual resources from virtual data centers through various allocation models.
Figure 25. Physical, Virtual, and Cloud Abstraction Relationships
For multi-tenancy, the following key constructs are introduced by vCloud Director.
Table 9. Virtual Data Center Definitions
Term | Definition |
Organization | The unit of multi-tenancy representing a single logical security boundary. An organization contains users and virtual data centers. |
Provider virtual data center | A grouping of compute and storage resources from a single vCenter Server. A provider virtual data center can be composed of one or more resource pools. It combines resource pools with one or more storage policies and can share resources to multiple organizations. |
Organization virtual data center | A sub-grouping of compute, memory, storage resources, networks and network routers, allocated from a provider virtual data center. A virtual data center is a deployment environment where vApps can be instantiated, deployed, and powered on. Virtual data centers cannot span multiple organizations. |
