What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with VMware vCloud Air, introduces the concepts and features of cloud computing. This chapter discusses the importance of cloud computing and how it can be leveraged to bring competitive advantages to businesses. It provides an introduction to vCloud Air, its components, and its features, and tells you how to get started with its services.
Chapter 2, Working with Virtual Machines, covers the basics of virtual machines, vApps, templates, and catalogs. It describes in detail how you can create and launch your own set of virtual machines in vCloud Air. The chapter also describes a few essential best practices and tips that you should keep in mind when designing and building your virtual machines on the vCloud Air platform.
Chapter 3, vCloud Air Networking and Security, delves into the concepts of networking, with a special emphasis on gateways, DHCP services, network address translation, load balancing, and so on. This chapter also provides you with a step-by-step guide that will help you connect your virtual machines with the outside world.
Chapter 4, Extending vCloud Air, focuses on the different types of connectivity options provided by VMware vCloud Air to customers for extending their on-premise data centers to the cloud. The chapter also provides an in-depth look at the VPN service and tells you how you can leverage it to connect vCloud Air with other VMware-backed private and public clouds. Then it covers the basics of installing and using VMware vCloud Connector as a tool to migrate your workloads from an on-premise environment to the vCloud Air platform.
Chapter 5, Monitoring Workloads on vCloud Air, covers a basic overview of the VMware vRealize suite of products, with a special emphasis on VMware vRealize Operations Manager. This chapter describes in detail how to deploy a fully functional vRealize Operations Manager into your on-premise VMware environment, and leverage it to monitor your workloads on VMware vCloud Air.
Chapter 6, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery using vCloud Air, describes the importance of a good and functional disaster recovery plan. This chapter also provides an in-depth view of VMware vCloud Air's disaster recovery service, its components, and its key features. It walks you through simple steps to configure vSphere replication with vCloud Air and test and perform virtual machine replications.