High Level vCloud Director Design Question

[TimR26]

Hello,

Before my question, I'll give a bit of background info.

We have a corp network, and we have a pre-prod network. Both on the same wire. The pre-prod network is really just another AD domain, using the same subnet, same vlan as corp. Pilot users will log into that domain with their corp machine and do pilot testing of new apps, etc. If an app passes testing and is ready to move to corp, the servers/devices, etc will simply join the corp domain. This is done in a vsphere cluster.

We also have a test network. This is where I work. The test network is physically segregated from the corp/pre-prod network. Initial development on new projects, plus pre-patching, troubleshooting, enchancing of systems is done in this environment. Once initial development is complete, the next phase is pre-production for piloting. This is also done in a vsphere cluster.

We want to use vcloud director because we're discovering that each project that comes in wants dedicated resources, etc so we figured that the "infrastructure as a service" capability that vcloud director provides will help us for so many reasons. so now we're turning into a service provider.

I would like to join the corp/pre-prod network to the test network physically, and extend the vcloud director resource pool into the pre-prod network (essentially taking control of pre-prod). I would also like to be able to create a cloud of resources for a specific client (a chunk of servers to develop a new app for example) and be able to move that cloud into pre-prod, and eventually into the corp vsphere cluster.

my question is this, if i have vcloud director resource pools for test and pre-prod, can I move a clients cloud resources (well, the VMs inside the cloud) into our corp vsphere cluster to be used in corp, or will the servers need to be rebuilt for corp? OR can I/should I add the corp vsphere cluster into the vcloud resource pool and simply move the cloud into the corp pool to give access to the corp network?

Any thoughts would be great....I'm kinda stuck, so opinions from others can help me think on different ideas...

[IamTHEvilONE]

Networking is just a matter of creating a pool of an appropriate type, and only assigning that network pool to the Organization that requires it.

So your ESX hosts in vCenter will become a Provider vDC (PvDC for short) in vCloud Director.

Once you have the resources (PvDC and Network Pools) added, you create an organization and assign some percentage of the PvDC resources to this Organization (also called an Organization's virtual DataCenter, aka OvDC).

Then the user's can login to the OvDC to consume the resources provided.

vCloud Connector will allow you to move a VM from vSphere into a vCloud Director instance.  There may be some configuration required during the deployment in the vCloud instance, but should be relatively easy.

Hopefully that gives you a start.

Best Regards,

Jon Hemming