Is vcloud connector even necessary?

[vxaxv17]

I am looking for some information regarding vcloud connector, specifically why it even exists.  Im likely missing something entirely and thats ok but Im finding it difficult to understand why someone would need to, or want to use this product.

We have a private Vsphere 5.5 environment set up in house.  We've recently started working with a vendor to provide additional capacity to our environment on an as needed basis.  We are running 5 esxi hosts here, our vendor is providing a 6th and there is a 1gb direct connection between the 2.  The vendor provided host is on the same network as our others as we just extend the vlan over to them.

I am currently using vcloud connector to move existing VMs over to them but this is slow and extremely inconvenient as I have to power them off first.  It also requires additional node and server VMs to be set up to manage all this.  Can someone explain why all of this added complexity even exists as opposed to just creating a new Data Center in my existing vcenter and adding the vendor provided esxi host to it?  So much easier to manage, less configuation needed and less to go wrong.

What am i missing here?  Ive brought this question up to my vendor and their response was basically sure, you can do it that way as well.  What im trying to understand is why you wouldnt want to (not best practice perhaps?) or if there are other use cases for vcloud connector that are different from what we have set up.

Thanks.

[Sreec]

Hi,

    vCloud Connector has got number of use cases.Few of them i have listed.

Copying a vApp from vSphere to a vCloud

Copying a vApp from a private vCloud to a public vCloud

Copying a vApp from a vCenter to another vCenter.

Even in environments not running vCloud Director, vCC can still be used to copy and move vApps.As long as both vCenter Servers are added as clouds in vCC, you can freely move workloads

between them.

Lossless copy:When you copy a vApp from a source vCloud Director cloud to a destination vCloud Director cloud, and you want to preserve the network configuration of the vApp, that is, its firewall and NAT rules, you can select the Lossless copy option in the Copy wizard.

UDT properties

Let you to set the minimum and maximum bandwidth for UDT transfer.

For copy tasks, you can view up-to-date data transfer status. You can see how much data has been transferred at each copy stage. The status is refreshed frequently.

This is far better than any using other third party tools for migration in a Private&Public Cloud Environments.If we really want to achieve true hybridity(From a single pane of glass viewing both the environment and moving workloads,VCC is one software which i highly recommend.

Adding to the above ODT,Layer 2 Stretch Deploy are some great features of VCC.

[vxaxv17]

Thank you for your reply.  It sounds to me that VCC has many uses but not in my particular case.  I am not using any vapps and the vendor provided hypervisors are on a private cloud which is the same subnet as my local esx hosts.  I guess my real question is, would vcc be recommended or even useful in this scenario as opposed to just adding the vendor provided hosts under my existing vcenter but in a separate datacenter?

Im just trying to find out if there is a recommended approach or a best practices for this type of setup.  Ive tried researching this sort of set up but I havent been able to find much information regarding it.

Thanks again.

[Sreec]

Glad to hear,those points were helpful.Which Vendor Provided Tool are we using here? I'm still not clear with your use case.

[vxaxv17]

Im not sure what you mean by vendor provided tool.  We have 5 local esxi hosts in a vcenter cluster.  Our vendor provides a 6th esxi host in its own vcenter currently.  My question is, is there any reason not to just add the vendor provided host into the our existing vcenter setup?  I do not understand the need or even desire to use vcc for this arrangement.

Thanks.

[Sreec]

Thanks for clarifying that.You are certainly right for adding a Host to existing VC. We don't need to make use of VCC. VCC will work only for Virtual Workloads,not for Physical Machines.Unless the host is a virtual machine(Nested ESXI) i don't find any strong reason why someone would suggest using VCC in your situation.