A vCloud Provider experience

Publié le 23 Décembre 2012

Hi,

Welcome to this new serie of videos. Today, I would like to look a little closer on the vCloud experience. There's a number of vCloud Provider available all around the world. They are all listed on vcloud.vmware.com and you can pick up the one that you prefer working with.

Among this list, a new service from VMware is available for few weeks. It's currently at the Beta stage and the aim is to provide an evaluation service to try the vCloud experience. I would like to use this Evaluation Service to showcase how easy and powerful is the vCloud experience.

But what's a vCloud Experience BTW?

The vCloud experience is all about enabling Service Providers to easily provide Infrastructure Services (IaaS) with a catalog of services while providing a simple and powerful experience for customer to consume these services.

Easy to say, not that easy to do! It takes a major effort for a Server Provider to be able to have all his infrastructure being able to run all at once and make services available in a matter of minutes. Thanks for the number of services that vCloud Director provide out of the box, things are much simpler now. For a customer, it's the guarantee of a robust, production proven service where they can send their internal workload as well as creating new workload to run.

As usual, I like to show how things work with hands on experience through some videos. The serie here is all from a customer point of view.

How does a customer can quickly and easily deploy virtual machines for his own use? How fast is that? Given the complexity behind, is it possible to abstract it all and just provide an easy to use interface. Without further ado, let's see that!

OK, fine. This looks fine but it's all hosted in a Cloud provider and, for many reasons, I may want to host these workload in my own Datacenter. I don't want to be locked and I want to keep my freedom of choices regarding where my workloads are running. Actually, if it was REALLY easy to move workload in and out of a public Cloud it could open a number of new possibilities: Application bursting, test applications in the Cloud before using them internally, use multiple vCloud providers around the world to be the closest from my users, etc...

Let's see how it goes if I want to copy my previously deployed CRM application into my internal Datacenter

Well, it does open a breadth of possibilities and looks very easy. One thing to keep in mind is that the interface shown in the first video is built up on top of the vCloud Director engine. It covers a number of use cases, mainly about deploying new stuff.

What if you want more?

Let's say you want to give access to some colleagues on some VMs, or create a VPN between your datacenter and your VMs sitting in this vCloud provider?

Fair enough, the point here is that there's much more need than simply deploying VMs and that's where you start thinking you would like to have the same ability you would have in your own datacenter, basically a Virtual Datacenter without all the hassle from a complex and costly legacy kind of Datacenter. Well, that's exactly what vCloud Director provide and the interface you see at first is just the tip of the iceberg. Just click on the vCloud Director interface and you'll find that you can create new network services (DHCP, VPN, NAT, ROUTING, etc..), manage users, add new networks to your VMs, etc... Basically, it provides a virtual Datacenter which is all yours. Enjoy!! :)

So, in summary, by using vCloud providers you can create virtual Datacenters and by using vCloud Connector you can connect it seamlessly to your own datacenter

How much does this all cost? Well, here's the current list price:

One thing you don't want to forget is that even if you shutdown a VM, you still pay for the storage. It makes sense but it can be a surprise if you leave-and-forget the VMs for 1 year :)

I hope you found some useful information in this article. To try all this simply got to vCloud.vmware.com

Merry Christmas to you all!!!