The benefits of VMware vCloud Connector: Part 1

A vast quantity of organisations have adopted a Private Cloud architecture, this could be an on premise virtualised environment or one that is colocated in a datacenter. For various reasons you may want to adopt a Hybrid architecture such as spinning up and collapsing testing environments, added resilience and redundancy offered by a Public Cloud Provider, burst capabilities, or simply to absolve capacity planning. In either approach you want to connect your private vSphere Cloud to a Public vCloud such the snazzy vCloud Director 5.5 platform supplied by Cloudhelix.

What is vCloud Connector: An Overview

Allows you to connect two or more clouds, load balancing between them to improve both speed and reliability.
Create a unified view across your internal datacenters, including private and public clouds, enabling you to work on VM’s, vApps and templates.
Cut deployment time of your workloads with zero reconfiguration of destination networks.
Manage your content catalogue across your entire cloud infrastructure, using the Content Sync function.
Before detailing how to, it’s worth understanding the main components used for the VMware vCloud Connector User Interface (UI) which comprises of three parts;

1. vCloud Connector UI

The VMware vCloud Connector UI is the user interface that the vCloud Connector server produces. It is registered to and accessed from the vSphere Client. You decide where to register the UI during the configuration process.

2. vCloud Connector Server

The vCloud Connector server is a virtual appliance that coordinates the activity of vCloud Connector, controls vCloud Connector nodes, and produces the vCloud Connector UI. You only need one vCloud Connector server.

3. vCloud Connector Nodes

VMware vCloud Connector nodes are virtual appliances that handle transferring content from one cloud to another. A vCloud Connector node must be installed in every vSphere or vCloud Director-based cloud that vCloud Connector oversees.

The graphic below provides an overview of the topology;

In Part 2 we will deploy the vCloud Connector Server.