VMware vCloud Air is a public cloud platform built on the VMware vSphere and the VMware vCloud Director platforms. It provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) on a pay-per-use subscription model. Currently, it provides three types of services for its customers, namely Dedicated Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, and Disaster Recovery.
VMware vCloud Air has come a long way from its early inception in 2013 as vCloud Hybrid Service. It wasn't until August 2014 that vCloud Hybrid Service was rebranded as vCloud Air. Today, vCloud Air has made its presence felt globally by having world-class data centers across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Using these data centers, customers can extend their on-premise infrastructure to vCloud Air by leveraging a host of VMware products and services, such as direct connect, vCloud connector, VMware NSX services, and so on. This provides a lot of flexibility and agility to organizations that are looking to actively expand their resources, but do not want to invest heavily in infrastructure startups. And now with vSphere 6 launched, VMware is actively looking to integrate its management, operations, and automations suite of products with vCloud Air, thus making it easy for enterprise customers to leverage and extend their existing on-premise portfolio of applications to vCloud Air.
This book will provide you with a step-by-step guide to and, hands-on learning experience with VMware vCloud Air. With easy-to-follow instructions, ample screenshots to refer to, and a host of best practices and tips, it will give you a practical understanding that will help you get started with VMware vCloud Air.
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.
This book assumes that you have basic to intermediate knowledge and hands-on experience with VMware products, including the VMware vSphere and vCloud Director platforms. A basic understanding of cloud computing and its delivery models and key benefits will also be beneficial here. You will, furthermore, need Internet access and the latest version of either Google Chrome or Firefox to access the vCloud Air environment. You will also require the latest copy of Putty Manager or any other such SSH tool for obtaining remote sessions of your Linux virtual machines on the vCloud Air platform. Although not required, it is beneficial to have either a working VMware vSphere-based lab set up in your on-premise environment. There are a plenty of tutorials out there on the Internet that can guide you through how to create a mini-VMware lab on a laptop. This will come in handy when integrating vCloud Air with products such as VMware vCloud Connector, vRealize Operations Manager, vSphere Replications, and so on.
This book is aimed at beginners, system administrators, cloud developers, and cloud administrators who are on the path to learning and leveraging VMware vCloud Air as a public cloud for their organization.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " To log in to the virtual machine, use the following credentials:
Username:
rootPassword:
<Guest_OS_Password>"
A block of code is set as follows:
<html> <body bgcolor="black"><font color="white"> <center><h1>This is HTTP PROD SERVER 1</h1></center> </font></body> </html>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# yum install httpd
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once the form is filled in, simply click on the Submit button."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
We also provide you a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2874EN_ColorImages.pdf
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.