Starting from scratch...vcloud director or vcloud automation center and any helpful step by step guides to recommend?

[learylike]

Hello all,

I have a question that may hopefully be a relatively easy one to answer for most of you.  I have been tasked with coming up with a public cloud solution using vmware products.  On the one hand there is vcloud director and the other is vcac or perhaps a combination of the 2.  From what I am reading it sounds like vcac is the direction vmware is looking for customers to go.  That said if one was planning to deploy a new public facing cloud which product would be the recommended direction to take.  It will need the ability to have multi tenancy capabilities ( isolated networks, storage, etc...), need a public facing interface and self provisioning portal, chargeback, and catalogs ( our master ones as well as customer created ones within their own VDC's).  Does vcac cover all of these criteria or from a service provider perspective is vcloud director the right way to go for now and the future?  Can you create VDC's strictly using vcac or would you need vcloud director in the background in order to truly be a public cloud type of offering?

Also if you happen to have and really good step by step instruction links or documentation on starting these from scratch it would be greatly appreciated.  I found this pretty good series on vcac 6 from kendrickcoleman for those reading this post and looking for a guide on vcac 6.0 installationhttp://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php/Tech-Blog/how-to-install-vcloud-automation-center-vcac-60-p...  Again hoping someone has some great words of wisdom as to which product to get started with in order to build out a secure multi tenant cloud solution.  Thanks so much in advance for all your feedback

[barnette08]

It really depends on your environment and your use-cases.  Our team was recently faced with this same issue and opted to continue with vCD since we already had a working instance that services customers.  One of the things that you need to know is that vCAC out of the box provides very basic functionality, so in order to do some of the really neat things that vCAC offers - you need to incorporate vCO. 

- vCAC does not allow resource 'throttling' like vCD does, so if you charge based on a specific vCPU speed (which we do), you need to tweak your chargeback model or stick with vCD

- vCD will be end of life 2017 so if you are going to vCD route, it might be worth while to look into VSPP which will continue support and development for vCD service providers only.

These were just a few things that we came across when making this decision, so I figured I would share.  vCAC is a great product and as you mentioned seems to be the strategy of VMware's future, but in our case we are waiting to see what the next version of vSphere has to offer since some of vCD's features should be moving down the stack to vSphere.

[learylike]

Thank you very much for your reply and summary of your situation.  We are still in the process of ironing out the details but this is very helpful information.  I had also read somewhere that there will be a migration path or some sort of utility as vcac matures to migrate from VCD but of course not sure how/when that may become available.  I think my biggest concern was now that vcloud hybrid services has been launched perhaps we should get more focus on leveraging that rather than try and battle through VCD or even VCAC.  I have known about the VSPP as well but we are a relatively small company and the monthly minimums might not be too cost effective for us just yet.  Again thanks for your insight and information