Vcloud Director 5.X

Vcloud Director Management Overview

Vcloud Director is an amazing product that has been around for many years now. As of now, the latest version is 5.5. There is a 3 day class to explain all of the features; I suggest you take that class if planning to run a vcloud environment. What you see here is a very brief overview of some of the features and capabilities that vcloud offers.

Start with the installation of the vcloud director. You can install it in a red hat virtual or physical machine or there is a really cool appliance running suse linux as well. The appliance is installed via ovf and but it has limitations. The full version was used here. Once installed, connect to the vcloud director using your browser and take a look at the choices available.

Next, create an Organization. Think of an Organization as a future tenant. An organization is a logical group of users or consumers. In this case, a Linux Organization is created. You give it a name, give it Ldap related information, select storage and network policies and add administrators for the Organization.

It's time to create a Provider Virtual Data Center. Think of it as a subset of the resources available of your vsphere environment. This could be a vsphere cluster or in this case a prebuilt Resource Pool (Not necessarily a best practice). A vsphere resource pool was created ahead of time.

Next, create an Organization Virtual Data Center. Think of the Org VDC as a layer that allows you to specify how many resources can be used by the tenant. You will need to associated to the Linux Organization and the Provider VDC created in the previous step. As you create it, you can select an Allocation Model (ex: Pay as you Go) to specify cpu and memory limits and quotas. During the wizard, you will associate this Org VDC to storage and networking. 

Now that the ORGs have been created, create a Catalog. A catalog provides users with a library of vApp templates and media to create vapps. Catalogs allows you to share vapp templates and media with other organizations. This catalog can be private, published and/or shared. When the catalog is published, all users in that org can see the catalog.

Now it's time to add a vapp template to the catalog and finally deploy a vapp . A vapp template is a virtual machine image that is loaded with an operating system and applications. A vapp template can't be deployed or powered on. There are options when adding vapp templates to a catalog (upload an ovf, import a vm from vsphere, or copy and move a vapp template from another catalog. An ovf was used in this case. A vapp is deployed from a vapp template. vapps can contain multiple vms.

Like I said, there is so much more but this will point you in the right direction to start. I highly suggest you read all of the pdfs from VMware and watch some videos in Youtube before starting.