VMware has announced the new product VMware vCloud Director (vCD from now on). I’ve read the early blog posts and been in some conversations and know at this point I just can’t give it any justice. The short view it is virtualizing a datacenter into software and then managing at that layer. After spending close to 2 hours both taking the vCD install lab (which was fantastic to show you the concepts by the way) and then talking with a brilliant individual from the vCloud Team (Paul from the APAC region), I know I need to chew on vCD a bit longer. Thankfully Yellow-Bricks has done an excellent write-up to give you a short intro to this new product offering.
So go read it and come back. Pretty powerful stuff even at a 1.0.
If you are familiar with the concepts of organizations, VM Templates, network Fencing and self service that are presented from Lab Manager, you will quickly get about 75% of vCD. The other 25% is coming from Chargeback and vOrchestrator capabilities. The challenge with Lab Manager is being able to run true production out of it. The management is a bit limiting and constrained by size. vCD takes all those concepts and adds a few more and pushes up the scalability to Service Provider size where you need to deal with limits of 4095 VLANs and Petabytes of storage.
Does this mean that an SMB can’t use vCD. I don’t believe so. When I look at this I easily see Lab Manager as dead now. Why spend any resources on a less functional, less useful, more limited product when you have something you just need to right size in licensing for someone that needs to use it for a “Lab Manager style Test/Dev” environment? vCD can do everything we do in Lab Manager today along with being able to have production right next to it in the same management interface.
Lab Manager is Dead. Long Live Lab Manager.
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One thing you do not mention is now vCD priced on a per-VM basis and requires enterprise plus making it very expensive compared to Lab Manager. I can buy a 2 cpu license for LM and run 50 machines for the same cost as 25 vm’s with vCD. Also vCD does not support linked clones, a major advantage that Lab Manager has over it. I know it’s dead but there are many environments that will be hurt by vCD until it can come up to feature parity.
Correct. You are talking about a marketing/licensing issue, not a technical issue. So adding in linked clones, what else is needed? If that is all I would rather have VMware spend their developer resources on a single product making it better and adding in feature parity to retire Lab Manager than splitting resources between two product lines that duplicate functionality.
Hi Ian, I am not so sure that Lab Manager is dead. vCD will require Enterprise Plus Licenses for all ESX hosts in the cluster that is part of the Resource pool.
The SMB market will not have the resources / finances available for such a venture.
Hi Ian, great blog! A colleague pointed it out to me, as I’m the “Paul” from the APAC region, actually it’s Phil, but I was the only guy from APAC on the Lab Team, so assume it’s me! As some of your other respondents have pointed out there are still some functional gaps between Lab Manager and vCD, so right now we should choose the right product for the right use case, but with a preference for vCD if it meets all the current requirements.
I’d just like to correct Maish’s post, vCD will actually work with vSphere Standard, but the limitation here is you have to set up all your PortGroups manually first in vSphere before they can be consumed. In an SMB environment that would be fine (small number of portgroups, relatively static).
We do strongly recommend Enterprise Plus because of the virtual Distributed Switch which allows vCD to do all the network provisioning dynamically.
Hope that helps, and clarifies things. As for linked clones… watch this space.
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