VMware vCloud Director Building Block (Resource Group) design

Over the past few days, quite a few articles have been appearing about VMware vCloud Director, including some excellent networking articles from Duncan Epping yellow-bricks.com and a great architecture piece from Frank Denneman frankdenneman.nl but I havent seen anything about how to deploy a VMware vCloud Director environment with resilience or high availability, so thought I would write an overview of the basic design.

So within the VMware Cloud Team we have taken a building block approach to deploying vCloud Infrastructure. By using this approach a resilient infrastructure can be guaranteed. A building block approach will enable the environments to easily scale horizontally. Building blocks within a vCD environment are referred to as “Resource Groups”.

A vCD environment consists of all components needed to run a VMware vCloud excluding the underlying vSphere infrastructure:
• VMware vCloud Director (vCD)
• VMware vShield Manager
• VMware Chargeback
• VMware vCenter (supporting the Resource Groups)

The diagram below shows how all the components fit together. I have posted this previously, but thought it would be beneficial to show again.

A key tenet of a cloud architecture is resource pooling and abstraction. vCD further abstracts the virtualised resources presented by vSphere. vCD provides two logical constructs that map to vSphere logical resources:
• Organization – Organizational unit to which resources(vDC’s) are allocated
• Provider Virtual Datacenter – vSphere resource groupings that power vDCs, further segmented out into organization vDCs
• Virtual Datacenter (vDC) – Deployment environments, scoped to an organization, in which virtual machines run and is a subset of a Provider vDC
• External Network – A customers connection to an external network
• Network Pool – A grouping of network segments used by Org and vApp network
• Org Network – Intra cloud network which uses resources (segment) from the Network Pool.
• vApp Network - Intra cloud network which uses resources (segment) from the Network Pool.

The following diagram depicts how a physical environment would look like corresponding to the logical design that has been shown in the previous diagrams.

As per the diagram, you have 3 Clusters:-

Cluster01 is for the Management VM's and Database VM's, including vCD, vCenter02 and vCenter03.
Cluster02 and Cluster03 are the resource clusters which are used for the Provider pVDC Clusters.

The physical infrastructure consists of the underlying vSphere components VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1 and related components.

This article is to help provide a basic understanding of how you would design and deploy your own cloud environments for use within your own Development and Proof of Concept environments.

Source - http://www.virtual-blog.com/2010/09/vmware-vcloud-director-building-block-resource-group-design/