Compelling Reasons for choosing VMware View for your next VDI Project

VMware View vs Citrix XenDesktop: which one better? A question any VDI implementer probably gets  quite often. And he looks through the internet and gets nothing concrete on the search results. While Citrix XD has been there for quite some time as a matured product and had been embraced by the industry wider than View untill View 5.0 and View 5.1 was released, VMware seems to be quite aggressive along with it's large partner based support for View.

I was pondering over a question: "If both the products from two competing VDI providers offer almost the same stuffs, why should one go for implementing VMWare View?" Because considering the maturity of the product, Citrix Xendesktop edges over VMware View. Well, I don't attempt to state here that View provides some unique features which do not exist in Citrix XenDesktop world. Rather, this post is more to analyze the key factors on deciding VMware View as one of the leading VDI solution.

1. Solid Integration with vSphere

With Server virtualization market being led by VMware it's simply easy for customers to be converted for the potential VDI projects. With VMware's product quality standards, excellent support model and Industry support, both from partner companies and evangelists it makes an easy transition to   The next VDI project go with VMware VDI. Also, as a product VMware View tightly integrates with vSphere. It uses vSphere as a underlying layer for provisioning virtual desktops. It also uses the storage, compute and network resources/services of vSphere for the Virtual Desktops, much used the same way it is used for the Virtual Servers in vSphere. VIEW also uses the resource pools of vSphere DRS for provisioning the Virtual Desktops. Also the provisioning component of VIEW, called as VMware VIEW Composer is installed mostly on vSphere vCenter Server. Although with VIEW v5.1 it can be installed on a separate server instance as well. VIEW Composer enables composing or creating a pool of desktops on demand basis with the help of underlying vSphere layer.

(Look at the picture below)

2. Linked Clone Technology

View Composer component uses an interesting feature called “VMware Linked Clone Technology” which optimizes desktop storage space and improves image control. It is used with VMware vSphere Snapshot Technology to create a Master Image of a Virtual Desktop which later will be used as a Model Image or a Base Image. Now this this Base Image is used and created several incremental Linked Clones (used for each individual Virtual Desktops) which act as unique pointers for each user to a single virtual machine master. These Linked Clones each have unique identities, and they can be powered on, suspended or reconfigured
independently of the master image. Linked Clones can be refreshed at the administrator’s discretion, without affecting user data or settings, to ensure tight OS management and optimize storage resources.

(Refer to the picture above)

To make it easier, if you need 1000 virtual desktops of Windows7 (say each with 10GB space), VIEW will not create/provision 1000 virtual desktops with each as 10GB, which equals to total of 1000x10GB=10,000GB of storage required at the provisioning layer. Rather you will install Windows7 OS with the required settings/applications on a VM, take a snapshot of it and use it as a Master/Base Image. Now the 1000 Virtual Desktops will be created as Linked Clones linked to this Master Image. So, in nature these Linked Clones will be incremental in nature (delta VMs) and will use the Master Image for common files and folders for Windows7 Desktop. This drastically reduces the amount of SAN/Shared storage used to deploy the Virtual Desktops and also enables for a much faster deployment timeframe. Also if you put this Master Image on a SSD tier of storage it drastically reduces the logon traffic latency, commonly known as “Boot-Storm”. Linked Clones also helps to fast refresh the Virtual Desktops to reconcile. Additionally the patch management process of the desktops becomes cake-walk using Linked Clone with Snapshot Technology.


3. Terradici's PCoIP Protocol

There has been a lot of wave in the industry on Terradici’s PCoIP Protocol on delivering Virtual Desktops over UDP packets. Citrix HDX (or ICA) uses TCP as the transport layer protocol making the connection oriented method heavier for the packets whereas PCoIP uses UDP as transport layer where it is connectionless protocol structure. And apparently it makes the delivery mechanism faster, commonly used in VoIP phones as well. Currently PCoIP protocol based VDI solution can be only implemented in VMWare View and Microsoft RDS. Microsoft RDS has been a recent addition.

PCoIP protocol comes with three essential features:

A) Host Rendering: with images being rendered on the Host rather than the client devices, the PCoIP protocol transmits only the encrypted pixels (not the data) across the network to the client which makes it possible to have stateless, decode-only client devices what we call "true zero clients" – with all the benefits they bring such as low maintenance, increased security, and cost savings.

B) Multi-Codec Display Processing: PCoIP effectively uses different codecs for different image types, text, video, graphics etc. and thus intelligently decomposes the images and optimizes the images encoding and delivery saving huge amount of bandwidth which is an extremely essential feature for any strong VDI candidate

C) Dynamically Adapts to Network Conditions: with advanced controls on PCoIP protocol settings, image quality delivery can be controlled as per the available bandwidth and it ensures responsive and interactive image experience to the end users.  

4. Less Vendor Lock-in

This is an interesting point probably we often tend to ignore on VDI implementation. VMware View can be integrated with any standard hardware like F5 Security devices, load balancers for the complementary features required in a complete Mobile Secure Desktop Solution unlike other leading VDI providers where you are stuck with their Hardware appliances and solutions.

5. Easy to Install and Manage

VMware View in my opinion is extremely user friendly and easy to install, configure and manage than Citrix XenDesktop. Whether you agree or not, Citrix XD is much more complicated compared to VMware View, probably due to the fact that Citrix acquired all the different components of XD and bonded them together whereas in case of VIEW, VMware has specifically built all of the components for VIEW. Time to deploy a VDI solution with VMware View is much shorter than Citrix XD, in my humble opinion. Also thanks to these rising companies like Pivot3, Nutanix which makes custom hardware appliances specially for VMware View, the speed of deployment has gone much faster!

6. Wide range of Partner Support

As with vSphere, VMWare View as well enjoys wide range of partner support and joint development/support initiatives to create a Secure Mobile Virtual Desktop Solution. It ranges from giants like HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC, NetApp etc. to start-ups like Terradici, Pivot3, Nutanix to name a few. 

7. Custom Hardware Appliances

Already mentioned above, now there are start-up companies developing a range of products called Hardware Appliances for VDI which tremendously fast provisions a VDI deployment right from POC stage to Production in easy scale-up fashion by adding additional appliance devices.

8. PCoIP Proxy for the Remote Clients

VMware View component named as “View Security Server” sits on the DMZ zone and thus gives a secure authentication entry-point to the existing LDAP/RADIUS servers. Since PCoIP uses UDP for transportation, it also acts as a PCoIP proxy to the underlying security layer and acts as an interface between the VIEW Clients and VIEW Connection Manager. (Refer to the picture on point no.1)

9. View Storage Accelerator & CBRC:
To make it simpler, CBRC (Content Based Read Caching) implemented as part of VIEW Storage Accelerator, caches the frequently accessed data from the Virtual Machines to the ESXi Hosts’ RAM Cache instead of fetching the information from the underlying storage and thus contributing reduce to the “Bootstorm” to a great extent. Studies show that View Storage accelerator helps to minimize the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in VMware View deployments by providing up to 80 percent reduction in peak IOPS and up to 65 percent reduction in peak throughput. (I have included a diagram below from CBRC Reference Architecture from VMware)



10. View Composer Array Integration (VCAI)

Quoting Narasimha K, VMware Product Manager, “VCAI  is a new “Tech Preview” feature of VIEW v5.1 that leverages capabilities of VMware vSphere as well as some of the NAS storage arrays that have the VAAI (vSphere API for Array Integration) NAS native snapshot capability.  This feature allows customers to offload the creation of linked clones to the storage array. It is used in conjunction with linked clone desktop pools and NFS datastores that are exported by NAS storage arrays such as NetApp and EMC.”

11. VMware View Planner

VIEW Planner much as vSphere Capacity Planner helps  architects/consultants to create the test-load for the VDI project and provides output which act as potential input for design considerations for the VDI deployment in terms of Storage, Compute power etc.

12. vCOps for View

vCOps for VIEW provides end-to-end visibility into the health, performance and efficiency of virtual desktop infrastructure so desktop administrators can proactively ensure the best end user experience, avert incidents and eliminate bottlenecks. vCenter Operations Manager for View improves IT productivity and lowers the cost of owning and operating VDI environments. Compare it with your existing Microsoft SCOM Server doing for your Windows Servers in a typical DIY Datacenter.

13. Local Mode or Offline Desktops

Beauty of VMware View is that you can have a Virtual Desktop downloaded to your local machine’s local storage if you are using a thick Windows client. You can continue working on them in a disconnected mode and as soon as you connect back to the network it will synchronize the changes to the vSphere layer to the VM and it’s associated storage. It is extremely helpful in cases like you can have a checked in offline desk while you are on a flight journey and as soon as you connect back to the network, you can check out the offline desktop. To use this feature you need a VIEW component called “VMware View Transfer Server”

14. Full GPU Virtualization

VMware View and NVIDIA together presents industry’s first and only fully virtualized 3D graphics adapter, expanding the possible use case for virtual desktop workloads. This unique capability enabled users to run and remote basic 3D applications, graphics and Windows Aero experience that require DirectX or OpenGL without requiring any additional server hardware or specialized graphics adapters. So, the virtual desktops will use the virtualized GPU (much like your virtual CPU or vCPU) from the dedicated NVIDIA VGX card installed on a ESXi Host. I believe there are similar solution available from Terradici as well.

15. 32 Host Cluster Possible

Earlier only 8 ESXi host was possible whereas now you can have as many as 32 ESXi hosts using NFS as the underlying storage tier.

16. Radius Two Factor Authentication

With View v5.1, RADIUS support has been added to the two-factor authentication feature making it an extremely secure VDI implementation.

17. Access Physical Desktop remotely

with VMware View you can not only access a virtual desktop but also access a physical desktop running a VIEW Agent software through VIEW Client. This is particularly helpful in case of migrating some specific users from Physical to Virtual Desktops and probably in a testing environment.

Which Cloud Certification?

I often get to hear  this query from my peers, friends and ex-colleagues: I am interested to know and learn about Cloud Computing; which course or certification I should go for?

Well, that's a tricky question and the answer lies much on from what background you have come from. But since I am from Infrastructure background, mostly my folks want to know about Iaas (Infrastructure As A Service) side of the Cloud. In this past one year, I have done fair amount of my own research into the exciting world of Cloud Computing and this is what I would like to share with you...

At the very outset, to jump into Cloud Computing, you need to have the theoretical basics more than the hands on. Once you understand the Theory Part of Cloud Computing, understanding practical is quite easy.

I highly recommend people to go for Rackspace's (a top Cloud Provider in Public Cloud segment) CloudU certification. This is vendor neutral since Rackspace itself is built on and promotes Open-Source based "OpenStack" Cloud Computing Tools. The curriculum covers pretty much basics on Cloud Computing and walks through different cases, examples and concepts. There are 10 videos (webinars) which needed to be watched which means to pass this certification you need to understand clearly the concepts covered in these 10 videos. The link for the videos: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/cloudu/curriculum  There are also Whitepapers associated with each Webinar/Video which can read and you need to answer the questions when you register for CloudU.

Another one which I myself have attended and received the Cloud Certification is from EXIN. EXIN provides a Cloud Computing Fundamentals Certification which is absolutely vendor neutral and quite extensive and yet lucid in terms of understanding. You can either do a self study and then register for an exam with EXIN or it's partners or else you can attend 2 days Full Time Course (8-9 hours each day) from any EXIN partner. At the end of the 2nd day session, one EXIN External Examiner will distribute the hard copy of the question papers and you need to write down the answers, although the questions are single/multiple choice questions. I had completed my training and certification in Bangalore, India and it costed me 15,000 INR including the course fee and exam fee. Refer to this link for further information: http://www.exin.com/us/en/exams/&exam=exin-cloud-computing-foundation

There are other certifications like CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) which is highly regarded in the industry, but I strongly feel it is most suited for people coming from Security background or people willing to go to Cloud Security field. And it is quite difficult and extensive study as well.

Cloud Certification from IBM didn't excite me much since their middleware's like Websphere is not much in dominance in the Cloud Market, to be frank. And IBM Cloud Certification is very much IBM product oriented. If you come from the same background, you can go for it or else discard.

Now talking about VMware vCloud, I myself is officially trained by VMware on vCloud and I have been working on VMware vCloud. It is definitely not for beginners! You need solid vSphere knowledge along with a basic knowledge in Cloud Fundamentals (covered in CloudU or EXIN like curriculum). Also you need good amount of understanding of Networking as a whole and Networking in vSphere, like Distributed Switch etc. If you are still interested, you can get an idea on vCloud from my earlier blog post. And it is like IBM, absolutely proprietary and talks only about VMware's Cloud Offerings.

There are couple more places to go for learning. One I highly recommend is Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Cloud. You can get plenty of information on AWS and different service offerings from AWS work by watching at their Official Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/videos?view=0  There are Excellent Getting Started Guides as well with step by step documents: http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/gettingstarted/ You can look into the AWS Reference Architectures as well in case you want to go deeper and want to know more about different AWS components like EC2, S3, CloudFront, Route53, RDS etc.

You can start knowing about Eucalyptus or OpenStack as well through their websites and resource materials like Getting Started Guides. But I will recommend to jump into either of these two only if you are little familiar to the world of Linux (or OpenSource as a whole)

Feel free to contact me via this blog or Twitter: @amitabhpancham if you have a question

Pivot3 VDI Appliance for VMware View and Pivot3 Certification

I have already written a blog post on this earlier. Since accidentally I created a separate page for it, the post is not visible on the Home Screen. 


To see my post on Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance, VMWare View and Pivot3 vSTAC VDI Certification, please go to this link:


http://amitabh-vworld.blogspot.com/p/pivot3-vstac-vdi-professional.html

Internet Accessible High Performance vSphere Home Lab Part II

Having created a home lab and trying to remotely connect to that, I was quite happy to see it's fast performance which I never received in VMware Workstation based lab. But sooner I realized I cannot access the VM's remote console (Right click the VM-> "Open Console") through this web client. 

On further researching, I found out TCP Port: 903 is responsible for this job. Since we are using a PAT (Port Address Translation) like service through "Dynamic Update Client" of http://www.no-ip.com it is essential that we need to make a similar entry for this port in our wifi router (refer to Step.10 in previous blog post on the same title). 

I also developed greed of accessing my vSphere Home Lab through vSphere Client itself remotely. And for that TCP Port 443 needs to be exempted. So, I made another entry for port 443. Now your Wifi Router console screen ("Advance Settings") should show like this:

 Now when I try to access the console of any VM by doing right click to the VM and choosing "Open Console" from vSphere Web Console, I can open it.

Also I tried to access my vSphere Home Lab Remotely through vSphere Client, I have no issues. Good thing is that the speed is so good that I don't feel I am accessing a Remote Lab at all. And unlike VMware Workstation based labs, this is blazing-fast and no latency at all (without even using SSD!)

Now you can play with your Home Lab Remotely through vSphere Web Client  as well as vSphere Client. 

I shall wait to hear your feedback if you have implemented this. I will be interested to know whether you have gained easy access and faster performance from your Home Lab or not. Feel free to contact me via the blog or write to me: Amitabh.Dey@Gmail.Com 

Internet Accessible High Performance vSphere Home Lab

There has been enough talk on vSphere Home Lab based on VMware Workstation. I have tried doing that. It's great, but with slow performance and still acceptable when you access the lab directly sitting at the machine itself. But what about a lab which I want to access from anywhere in the world and without any slow performance? This solution is not at all a suitable one.

Hereby I will give you a complete idea (step by step) to create a High Performance (Yes it is possible!) Home Lab accessible remotely. And I assure you there will be no mouse lagging or latency issue.

No further talks, straight to building the lab now...

So what you need to build this lab...

Pre-requisites: 

1. A decent hardware. My suggestion: Go for a desktop PC with Intel i7 3Ghz, at least 16GB RAM, one 2TB SATA HDD dedicated for this purpose. These is cheap commodity now-a-days. If you can get a SSD of at least 250GB that's great, you will get terrific performance! But if you can't, still okay. I assume you have a decent broadband line with wifi, everyone has now-a-days. Connect your Desktop PC to the Wifi Router through a Ethernet cable. Let's assume the Wifi Router IP is: 192.168.0.1

If you have an existing PC matching similar configuration that's great. You will now ask: "But do I have to wipe out my existing Windows/Linux and any other applications?" No, you don't need to. That's why I asked for a spare HDD (call it as HDD2) of 2TB. I assume your Windows OS and other applications are sitting on HDD1. We will keep them intact, we are not going to touch them. 

So, what next?

Ans: Make use of ESXi USB Installation. Take a 4GB USB stick. Keep it exclusively to store your ESXi installation.

Step1. ESXi installation on bare metal machine with the help of USB:

Boot your PC through ESXi DVD Installer CD. Alternatively if you have another (2nd USB stick of at least 4GB) USB stick and the .ISO file of ESXi downloaded from VMware site, you can make the 2nd USB stick bootable drive with the help of a free tool called "UNetbootin". 

Download it from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ by clicking on downloading for Windows (I will cover Windows here, you can choose Linux as well depending on your current OS)

Click on the "Diskimage" radio button and select "ISO". Click on "..." button and select the ESXi installer ISO from the location wherever you kept it.

Make sure the type is: "USB" and on the Drive choose the Drive letter of USB Stick 2. Click on "OK". This will make the 2nd USB stick as bootable ISO. Or else you will need to download the ISO and burn it to a DVD and boot from that DVD.

Go through the ESXi installation process and install ESXi on the 1st USB stick. This way you are using your PC's hardware more like in a bare metal server but you are not touching the existing Windows OS with applications. You can always go back to your Windows by NOT booting from the 1st USB stick. So, now you have installed your 1st ESXi on your home lab.

Go ahead and configure the ESXi with a management port with:

IP address: 192.168.0.100 | Subnet: 255.255.255.0 (should be at per with what your Wifi router provides to it DHCP clients) | Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1 (IP of the Wifi Router)

Step2. Configure the 1st ESXi by connecting to it so that it can host a nested ESXi by editing the required files. There are other blogs if you want to know what are the changes required to do in the 1st ESXi (or Base ESXi)  so that it can host nested ESXi.

Step3: Open vSphere Web Client on another machine/laptop and connect to the newly installed ESXi (IP: 192.168.0.100). Create a Datastore of 2TB from the spare HDD you kept aside for this home lab. I assume the drive is connected in the drive bay in the PC and ESXi Host can access this disk. Give this Datastore a name, say: TOSHIBA

Step3: Create a VM and install ESXi on that. Give it 4GB vRAM and 2x2=4vCPUs. This will be your 2nd ESXi and it is nested on top of 1st or the Base ESXi. Give it a Management IP of 192.168.0.101 | Subnet: 255.255.255.0 | Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1 (IP of the Wifi Router)

Step4: Create another VM of 4GB vRAM, 2x2=4vCPUs (for better performance. You can reduce the configuration gauging the performance), 20GB Thin Provisioned Disk. Install Windows Server 2008 R2 64Bit. Install the required Service Pack and Windows Patches.

Step5: Give it IP of 192.168.0.110 | Subnet: 255.255.255.0 | Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1 (IP of the Wifi Router)

Step6: Install vCenter Server on this with SSO. And also install the vSphere Web Client Server. I assume you keep the default port setting for http and https which are 9090 and 9443 respectively.

Step7: Check if you can access the vCenter through Web Client from your laptop by going to this web url: https://192.168.0.110:9443/vsphere-client/ If yes, you are almost there! Login with the required credentials. Create your sample Data Center and you both the ESXi Hosts on this virtual Data Center.

Now you have a Nested ESXi Home Lab which is fast, simple and agile too. But how do I access it from Internet? (Your next question)

For this you need a Public IP. Public IP is expensive to get one from the ISP. So, how we do go about it?

We will use a great free stuff for this purpose called "No-IP DUC (Dynamic Update Client)"

Step8: Go to http://www.noip.com/downloads.php?page=win from your vCenter Server. Click on "Download" button and install it on the vCenter Server. It will install the "Dynamic Update Client" from No-IP on your vCenter Server. Now you need to go the no-ip.com site and register for a free dynamic DNS by providing your email and choosing a password and activate it. It will provide you a FREE PUBLIC IP.

Step9: Go to vCenter and login to DUC client by the email address and password you used in Step8.

To make you understand, the DUC client sitting on your vCenter Server will do kinda NAT operation from Public IP to Private IP whenever you try to access the vCenter from outside.

But hold on! You still will not be able to access your machine from outside unless you specify the exemption rule with the vCenter Internal IP and Port number on your Wifi Router. Because any traffic coming down to vCenter from web has to go through the Wifi Router first. So, for example you are trying to access vCenter by RDP from Web, your Wifi should not block Port 3389 (RDP Port) traffic coming to the vCenter Server (to Internal IP which is 192.168.0.110).

So how do we do it?

Step10: Login to your Wifi Router and go to the Advanced Option. It depends on which router you are using. I am using a DLINK router and it shows me a screen like this:

Put the settings exactly the way I have put it in the screen. In case the input part is not clearly visible in the picture, let me post a zoomed picture for better visiblity.

Once the setting is done, click on "Save Settings". It will ask you to reboot the router. 

Step11: Restart the Wifi Router.

Step12: Go to any other PC/laptop's (NOT any mobile device!) browser and give this url:

https://<Your Public IP You Received from No-IP>:9443/vsphere-client/ and hit Enter. You should see the vSphere Web Client Login Screen like this:

Step13: Login with your vCenter Administrator ID and Password and you will see a screen like this:

Keep playing with your vSphere Home Lab remotely from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection as Adobe Flash enabled Browser. Remember you will NOT be able to connect to this Home Lab from iPAD or Android Tablets since they don't support Adobe Flash. 

For that you need a separate server (or appliance) to be installed, called as "VCMA Server". But with the DUC Client in picture it may be slightly difficult to install the DUC client in the VCMA since it is an appliance until now. I have not tried the DUC Linux Client yet and also not sure whether it will be able to get installed in any VMware appliance. It should be, since the appliance is nothing but SUSE or some other Linux variant on the OS level. That makes a room for another blog post...

Happy playing around with your Home Lab REMOTELY :-)

vCloud Director Components

People often ask me what is vCloud Director (VCD) and how vCloud works? While I was learning and working on vCloud although I found it to be an extremely wonderful and scalable product but sadly presented in a very complicated manner, something which is hard to digest for the beginners.

In this blog post, I have made an attempt to explain the concepts of vCloud and it's components in a much simpler manner.

Q: At the outset, what is vCloud?

Ans: vCloud is a Iaas type Cloud powered by a set of tools from VMware by which you can create:

1. Your on-premise Infrastructure -As-A-Service (or Iaas) Private Cloud. Example of a private vCloud will be something like a company say, GE (General Electric) which has decided to build it's own Private Cloud and in turn all the department or COEs or Business Units of GE become it's customers ( or "Tenants" in Cloud term).

2. Or you can build Amazon or Rackspace like "Public Cloud" built with the help of vCloud too. The greatest example of Public vCloud would be probably Vmware's Public Cloud itself where it extends the Public vCloud facility with the help of different partners across the globe. e.g: CSC, Singtel, HCL, Colt, AT&T etc.

3. Now you may ask, what about Hybrid Cloud? Can I make a Hybrid Cloud through VCD? Well, that's possible too! (with the help of a vCloud component called "vCloud Connector").

Here I am not going to define what is Cloud and how Cloud works. I assume you know it already. If not, I encourage you to go for Cloud Foundation self-study courses like "EXIN Cloud Computing Certification" or Rackspace's "RackU Certification". and if you need more information on that feel free to drop me a line.

Next question, what are the different components of vCloud?

Ans:

         A) VMWare vSphere (version 5.1 : I will go with the latest version of vSphere)  comprising of:

1. ESXi Servers or Physical Hosts which will provide the required compute resources like CPU, Memory and Network (Network Ports and Connectivity at the base vSphere layer)

2. vCenter Server: Acting as a VMM tool or Management console for the ESXi and hold other components or virtual appliances.

3. Storage: Depending upon your infrastructure, it may be Fiber Channel or FCOE or iSCSI SAN or NFS. Storage is presented to the Cloud layer to the tenants through vSphere and vCloud software. We will talk about this later.

4. Network: This consists of your Standard Virtual Switches, Distributed Virtual Switches and any Cisco Nexus 1000V switch if you have. Only the port-groups or ports are presented to the vCloud layer. We have another tool/software for advanced networking requirements like Router, NAT device, Firewall called "vShield Edge"

(N.B: I can include vShield Endpoint and vShield Edge here, but I will not do so to keep simplicity to the readers. Although they stay at the vSphere layer, for ease of understanding I have kept them aside from vSphere Layer)

vSphere suite will provide the basic vSphere Virtualization layer absolutely must for any Cloud setup. This layer decouples physical resources like memory, CPU, Network, Storage etc. from the underlying Hardware layer. This is also the layer where one creates resource pools which is again an aggregation of the physical resources from different physical hosts. These resource pools will later be shared between Tenants, Organization VDCs and vApps . (If you wonder what these terms are, I would say don't try to burn your head in these now. We will talk about them eventually)

B) vCloud Director Software: 

This will provide the Cloud Layer (upper layer which sits on top of vSphere Layer). It will help us with the creation of different core Cloud components like Provider and Organization vDCs, vApps etc. For now you can imagine a vCloud as a group of servers sharing a common database. Every vCloud Director Servers runs a set of services which is called as "vCloud Director Cell". These group of vCloud Servers will eventually connect to multiple vCenter or a single vCenter Server (depending on the complexity of your VCD setup) .

A vCloud Direct Server is nothing but a RHEL6 VM or can be a Physical Machine  and vCloud component is installed on top it. I will talk about the installation and configuration later in details.

Note: a single vCloud Director Server can be mapped to only one cell and single database whereas a single database is shared between the multiple VCD Servers to maintain common information for the vCloud Cells in a VCD group)

vCloud Director will also provide us with a Web Portal or Web Console through which Cloud Administrators will connect to it and configure further.

vCloud Director also puts the "vCloud Agent" software in every ESXi that it connected through the vCenter Server.

There is also another NFS Server that vCloud Director connects to which will store the common configuration for all the vCloud Servers in a multi-vCloud Director Cluster Setup.

Apart from this vCloud Director connects to LDAP services (like Microsoft Active Directory or Open-source's OpenLDAP), SMTP too.

2. vShield Manager  (and vShield Edge) : This is a virtual appliance (downloaded from Vmware site) which provides the network services to the Cloud Layer. Note one vCenter Server can connect to only one vShield Manager and also a vShield Edge.

Diagram1. (Courtesy: Vmware Corp.)

As you can see in this picture, a vCloud Director Cluster (bordered in dotted lines, Green color area) consists of multiple  vCloud Director Servers. Each vCloud Director Server (showed in Blue Line Box) consists of a vCloud instance what is called "vCloud Cell". All these servers in turn are connected to one single vCloud Director Database to store common cell information.

Now look at this Diagram2. below: (Diagram2. is in fact the extension of Diagram1.)

Diagram2. (Courtesy: VMWare Corp.)

Here what it explains is that the group of vCloud Director Servers are connected to a bunch of vCenter Servers on the vSphere layer which in turn are connected to their respective ESXi Host Servers. Like every vCloud Director, vCenter has it's own Database which you install and configure when you are setting up your vCenter Server during vSphere Installation/Configuration (or you connect to an embedded DB in case of say vCenter Appliance).  Also, as I have mentioned previously every vCenter Server also connects to vShield Manager. vShield Manager holds a very important role in the vCloud Family and no wonder it deserves a separate blog post exclusively.

Until this point what we saw is that our Cloud or what we call vCloud in VMWare World :) is ready to be deployed. You immediately come up with a question: But what about charging the customers? Is it done by vCloud itself?

NO! For that we have something called "Vmware Chargeback Manager". Yes, by now you figured out that it is another appliance which can be downloaded and installed .  Chargeback Manager will create the usage reports, do billing etc.

Did we miss something else too or we are good to go?

Well, there's another optional component named "vCloud Connector" which will enable your Private On-Premise Cloud to be connected to other Public Clouds (at this moment those have to be vClouds as well, if I am not wrong) making it a Hybrid Cloud. Think about a situation, you have set up a Private Cloud in your company and set up the workloads. Eventually it needs growth and you find it a cheaper and easier to move workloads to a Public vCloud provided by any of the vCloud Partners of Vmware or vice versa. There comes VCD Connector to your rescue.  See the diagram below.

Diagram3 (Courtesy: Vmware's Official Blog)

I hope by now we have a basic idea about the different building blocks of VCD. To sum it up let's refer to this architecture diagram:

Now that we have some basic idea about VCD, we will go further in-depth in the coming posts, Stay Tuned...