Friday, November 18. 2011
VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Evaluation Guide
This VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Evaluation Guide is designed to provide a guided, hands-on evaluation of the most compelling and relevant features of vCloud Director. It walks users through a series of procedures, each building upon the previous. When completed, the evaluator will have a working configuration that illustrates the key concepts that should be understood before deploying a production private cloud solution with vCloud Director.
Because this guide is to be leveraged for evaluation purposes, it has been written to require the least amount of hardware resources possible. This enables users who do not have a dedicated test lab to still fully evaluate the capabilities and concepts of vCloud Director. This purpose-built evaluation environment should not be considered as a template for deploying a production environment.
VMware vCloud Director 1.5 virtual appliance available for download
VMware vCloud Director is a software product that provides the ability to build secure, multi-tenant clouds by pooling virtual infrastructure resources into virtual datacenters and exposing them to users through Webbased portals and programmatic interfaces as a fully-automated, catalog-based service.
vCloud Director relies on vSphere resources to provide CPU and memory to run virtual machines. In addition, vSphere datastores provide storage for virtual machine files and other files necessary for virtual machine operations. vCloud Director also utilizes vSphere distributed switches and vSphere port groups to support virtual machine networking. You can use these underlying vSphere resources to create cloud resources.
Cloud resources are an abstraction of their underlying vSphere resources. They provide the compute and memory resources for vCloud Director virtual machines and vApps. A vApp is a virtual system that contains one or more individual virtual machines, along with parameters that define operational details. Cloud resources also provide access to storage and network connectivity. Cloud resources include provider and organization virtual datacenters, external networks, organization networks, and network pools. Before you can add cloud resources to vCloud Director, you must add vSphere resources.
The vCloud Director software is distributed as a Linux executable file but also as a virtual appliance stored in Open Virtualization Format (OVF). vCloud Director 1.5 components and the database are packaged into this vCloud Director virtual appliance.
Download VMware vCloud Director 1.5 virtual appliance
For customers looking to rapidly install an evaluation environment, vCloud Director is distributed in a virtual appliance format file (.ova) for use in a limited-scale environment.The virtual appliance includes a pre-configured Oracle XE database installed on a CentOS VM. The virtual appliance is designed to easily set up your evaluation by importing to your existing vCenter Server. Please refer to the VMware vCloud Director Evaluation Guide for more information and details on deploying this vCloud Director Appliance.