vCloud Air service offerings

VMware vCloud Air offers three types of service offerings for the end users, each with its own preconfigured and preallocated amount of compute, storage, and network resources to begin with. These resources are just a starting point and can be extended as per the user's requirements.

The types of vCloud Air services

The vCloud Air service offerings are broadly classified into three main categories: Dedicated Cloud, which provides a single tenant virtual private cloud for the end user; the VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud, which is more of a multi-tenant virtual private cloud, and can be used by multiple organizations; and last but not least, Disaster Recovery, which provides seamless DR options from premises to the cloud and vice versa.

The following image shows the types of vCloud Air Services:

Image source: VMware

The Dedicated Cloud service

The Dedicated Cloud service provides a single tenant private cloud with dedicated computing servers, layer-2 network isolation for workload traffic, persistent storage volumes, and a dedicated cloud management instance. Think of it as your own rack, servers, storage, and networks. There is no multi-tenancy here. This type of dedicated infrastructure is best suited for organizations that have really sensitive data, and don't wish to share infrastructure with any other organization; for example, banks and government organizations would generally go with a dedicated cloud service.

The dedicated cloud service provides users with more control and flexibility of how the resources are used and administered. Think of a dedicated cloud as your own private cloud hosted in a public cloud.

Table 1 – Dedicated Cloud service capacities:

Each dedicated cloud service comes with a starter pack of the information mentioned in the preceding table; however, users are not limited to that capacity only. Dedicated cloud users can extend their capacities as per their requirement anytime by simply logging in to their VMware account and purchasing additional resources on demand.

The Virtual Private Cloud service

The Virtual Private Cloud service works in a similar way as the dedicated cloud service. The only difference is that the underlying physical resources are shared between multiple customers. An important point to remember here is that although the physical infrastructure is shared, it is logically isolated and provided to inpidual customers, thus providing an illusion that they were running on dedicated resources directly. This logical isolation has no performance impact to the customers, as the resources are dedicated and made available on demand whenever required.

Table 2 – Let us have a quick look at a Virtual Private Cloud's service capacities:

The Disaster Recovery service

Disaster Recovery or Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a new service offering provided by vCloud Air, which is intended to take backups, and protect your virtualized infrastructure, whether it is hosted on the vSphere or vCloud Director environment.

This service enables users to manage and protect their virtual infrastructure by asynchronously replicating the virtual machines from a source site; say, your local vSphere environment to the cloud for recovery.

Table 3 – Disaster recovery (RaaS) service capacities:

Tip

As a vSphere customer, or vSphere and vCloud Air customer, you will need to contact your VMware sales representative to purchase a vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery subscription.

vCloud Air relies on two of the VMware's products to perform disaster recovery, and a brief about each is as follows:

vSphere Replication

vSphere Replication is a part of the vSphere product suite that enables users to replicate and automate the failover of their virtual machines to remote sites, such as vCloud Air. An important thing to note here is that vSphere Replication does not support automatic failback of virtual machines; that is, vSphere Replication does not move the virtual machines from vCloud Air back to the on-premises vSphere environment automatically. This is a manual process.

vCloud Connector

vCloud Connector is a free tool provided by VMware, and is used to connect your on-premises vSphere environment with a remote VMware vCloud. vCloud Connector is a useful tool when it comes to migrating templates and virtual machines from an internal private cloud to a public cloud.