In Part 1 of the vCloud Air Series, I have covered how to get started. Part 2, covered how to get your first VM set-up with vCloud Air OnDemand and Part 3 covered how to make use of vCloud Connector to get your vCloud Air OnDemand environment connected with your local vSphere setup.

Part 4 of the vCloud Air Series will be the last post in this series. Today, I want to cover some of the most common use cases for cloud solutions:

• Flexible resources for peak-hours
  • If you have certain hours of the day where you need more resources to process data or run some application, often it is reasonable to consider services like VMware’s vCloud Air OnDemand service. With its integration in your local vSphere environment, it is an easy process to move applications into the cloud and add resources.
    The ROI for adding physical servers for certain peak hours is often much less than utilizing the flexibility of on-demand cloud environments.
• DR solution
  • vCloud AirOnDemand provides perfect capabilities for disaster recoveries.
    • Scale up potential for local applications
    • vCloud Air Disaster Recovery is build on vSphere Replication and provides proper failover capabilities. Fail over to your cloud environment within minutes.
• Test and development
  • QA and development can now test their applications in the cloud and avoid incpompatibilies due to the feature-rich integration with VMware vSphere.
  • Allow QA teams to run tests in production-like environments. You could clone your production environment and let them test it there while cutting your costs for traditional physical hardware.
  • Quickly scale-up your test and development infrastructure. vCloud Air allows you to quickly scale up your test infrastructure to achieve more accurate and accelerated test cycles.

 

 

In Part 1 – vCloud Air OnDemand – Special Promo, I have covered the sign-up process including some special promo. Part 2 – vCloud Air OnDemand – Deploy your first VM, covered the deployment of VMs and how easy it is to use.

Today, I will cover how to make use of the vCloud Connector. vCloud Connector links your local cloud/private cloud with vCloud Air and provides you with an easy-to-use interface. vCloud Connector is fully integrated into vSphere vCenter and once configured, you’ll be able to manage all your clouds through it.

Note: Only vCloud Air and local vClouds are supported. No AWS, Azure etc.

 

The following steps will cover the steps to get your private and public cloud connected.
Before we get started, make sure you have downloaded the vCC Server and vCC Node from here.

1. Deploy both OVFS to your local vCenter instance and power them on.
   
   
2. Connect to the vCloud Connector Node . The default credentials are admin/vmware.
3. Click on the “Node” tab and go to “Cloud”. Select vSphere as your Cloud Type and specify your local vCenter Server.
4. Once the Cloud Registration was successful, go to your vCloud Connector Server . The default credentials are admin/vmware.
5. Click on the “Server” tab and go to “vSphere Client”. Specify your local vCenter credentials and click on “Register”. This will register the vCloud Connector extension to your vCenter.
6. Once the registration has completed, go to the “Nodes” tab and click on “Register Node”. Fill in all the details your local vSphere environment and click “Update”. You should now see two Nodes configured. The Local Content Library of your vCC Server and your local vCenter instance.
   
7. Next, let’s add your vCloud Air OnDemand to the mix. Click on “Register Node” again. The Node URL will depend on the location of your vCloud Air OnDemand setup. You can find the URLs listed here.
   Note: Your VCD Org Name can be found when you login to https://vca.vmware.com and open the vCloud Director -> Administration -> General. It’s a little hidden.
8. Once your local vSphere environment and your vCloud Air OnDemand setup are configured, go to your local vCenter and open the vCloud Connector.
9. You should now be able to see both setups and manage them from here.