When installing PowerCLI, the optional vCloud Director PowerCLI can be installed to let you manage vCloud environments. This addition allows customers to connect to and manage vCloud installations, either in a private installation using vCloud Director or in a hybrid or public cloud hosted on a vCloud Provider. For vCloud customers who do not handle backend administration on vCloud Director datacenters, VMware also offers the PowerCLI for Tenants distribution, which is a reduced set of cmdlets needed for an end-user. For the recipes in this chapter, you will need the full distribution of PowerCLI with vCloud Director PowerCLI. Connecting to vCloud is a little different than connecting to and managing vSphere with PowerCLI, but all of the concepts that you learned up to this point apply in a vCloud environment.
Think of vCloud as a superset of controls over the vSphere virtualization platform. vCloud extends the concepts of vSphere, but also adds the concept of providers and...