VMware vCloud Director® gives service providers the ability to build secure public clouds, which can significantly increase virtual data center efficiency for delivering resources to consumers, by pooling compute (CPU and memory), storage, and networks and presenting them through catalog-based services. This allows VMware vCloud® tenants to consume infrastructure without the operational overhead of having to manually configure and provision hardware resources.

Resources such as compute, storage, and networks are the fundamental building blocks for service providers to consider when designing a solution. By employing vCloud Director, these resources can be grouped into multiple tiers, based on their specification, capacity, or performance capabilities.

Storage is of course a key resource, which vCloud Director abstracts to deliver infrastructure within the Virtual Data Center (VDC), and therefore configuring VMware vSAN™ storage resources to support a vCloud platform requires the consideration of a range of provider use cases and workload types.