VMware Cloud Director Service on VMC

VMware Cloud Director service enables cloud providers to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS in multi-tenant modality with enhanced VMware NSX-T support, allowing provisioning of custom-sized, tenant-based, isolated and secure VMware Cloud resources. This ability to service multiple smaller and medium sized tenants on the same infrastructure, offers flexibility to right-size the VMware Cloud on AWS environments to meet customer needs and requirements of all customer tiers.

The new VMware Cloud Director service is a container-based SaaS version of the proven VMware Cloud Director on-premises service-delivery platform. The service, available through Cloud Provider Hub, helps cloud providers gain better economies of scale and generate new value and revenue for their cloud businesses.

How you can use this service. You can consume this service via VMware Cloud Provider Hub.

You can add tenant also but before that create a org so that tenant can use resource/capacity from there.

Now you have to provision resource SDDC VMC and Cloud director instance.

When you click on VMware Cloud Director you can see below screen. This is VMware Cloud instance (vCloud Director old name).

Now Lets create a new one for that click on create instance.

After that fill all the details.

Select template is giving you an option to select the VCD version and it cloud be very latest GA for those who love latest and greatest all the time but you can choose that you can take update which is major once a year and reset just patching only.

Note: May be you can get a beta instance access as well to test before GA.

Now it will not start charging you until it’s connected to SDDC, Charges are Per Core / ESXi which is connected to.

It will take approx 3 mins and average 15 mins but again it depends on DNS to resolved.

In Demo it was taking time so John Dwyer switched to already created org and instance.

Moonbeam is cloud director instance.

Here you can find basic options like reset administrator password, Create support bundle and associate SDDC etc.

Now click on Open VCD

Now when you click on open vdc it will open a new window with Cloud Director login screen. it’s with self sign cert and dns name. we can associate with our domain name and cert.

There is nothing here because we have not added yet any VMC host or vCenter server.

Under user you can see two default accounts.

There is serviceadministrator account is used by VMware support team to provide tech support and we can disable this account but can not delete this account.

Click on associate custom domain

Before that create DNS record with third party dns provider.

In back-end it’s actually deploying cert on cells via command line.

Like we are doing with 9.5 and 9.7 in on-prem vcd under keystore. Also, there is no downtime during this activity.

Here is the screen from John Dwyer SDDC console where he provisioned this host and vCenter server so that we can attach to this VCD.

The network topology is limited in VMC, so as you know that by default we have just management gateway and compute gateway.

So there is no other option to do network isolation. So in order to use CDS Cloud director Service, there is new feature in VMC

That allows more than 1 (One) T1 gateway. So, these becomes Edge gateway in Cloud Director.

How to enable this feature -> Once you subscribe the services a ticket is submitted to VMware and VMware change the settings on your master org and all the SDDC over there has this feature enabled.

Here you can see two or more entry if this feature is enabled.