VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) Options Explained

You will be able purchase capacity from VMware‘s new vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) in two ways when it becomes available to the public at or shortly after VMworld 2013: vCHS Dedicated Cloud and vCHS Private Cloud. I will explain the two different cloud options and what they mean to customers.

With vCHS a company would purchase resources under what I would call a master account. These services can be a single dedicated or virtual private cloud (VPC) offering or multiple instances. I can then as an administrator assign access to my VPCs on a per user basis. This allows me to restrict access to a single VPC that is needed for a user that is part of a specific project for example.

vCloud Hybrid Service: Dedicated Cloud

The dedicated cloud offering from vCHS is exactly what the name implies. It is a dedicated vCloud instance on a dedicated vSphere cluster and vCenter. This means that you would be the only customer with access to these dedicated resources.

As a Dedicated Cloud customer what type of vCloud Director actions can you configure.

  • Create / Destroy VMs, Disks & Networks
  • Configure an existing Edge Gateway (DHCP, Firewall, NAT, VPN and Load Balancing rules)
  • create private catalogs
  • create additional users in the VPC
  • Exposes the consumer vCloud APIs for consumption
  • Can create / delete Virtual Private Clouds from your dedicated resources
  • Assign and remote resources from VPCs
  • Can deploy Edge gateways in the VPCs

VMware is not using the default user permission groups from vCloud so in a dedicate cloud instance your permissions is something just below a System Administrator. So you can manage most of your dedicate vCloud Instance but do not have full control over everything you might if it was your private on-prem version.

Since these are dedicated resources VMware does require a longer term commitment upfront from customers for this type of instance. The current term commitment for a dedicated cloud instance is 12, 24 or 36 months.

This offering starts at the minimum size listed below and can be scaled up from this point. The incremental amounts that it can be scaled is not currently available at this time.

Compute

  • Minimum Size
  • 120GB of vRAM
  • 30GHz of vCPU

Storage

  • Starts at 6TB

Network

  • 50 Mbps of allocated bandwidth
  • 1 Gbps burstable bandwidth
  • 3 Public IPs

vCHS: Virtual Private Cloud

The Virtual Private cloud (VPC) offering from vCHS is also exactly what the name implies. It is a piece of a shared vCloud instance. This means that VMware is slicing up a larger vCloud Director install and selling it multiple customers. If you are familiar with vCloud Director this translates to you essentially purchasing an Organization with an Org VDC within vCloud. And that equals some portion of a provider virtual datacenter that is supplying resources to you VPC or organization.

As a VPC customer what type of vCloud Director actions can you configure.

  • Create / Destroy VMs, Disks & Networks
  • Configure an existing Edge Gateway (DHCP, Firewall, NAT, VPN and Load Balancing rules)
  • create private catalogs
  • create additional users in the VPC
  • Exposes the consumer vCloud APIs for consumption

Similar to the permissions that were explained above for the dedicated instances, VMware is essentially granting you the permission of an Organization Administrator if you purchase a vCHS VPC instance.

This offering starts at the minimum size listed below and can also be scaled up from this point. The amounts that it can be scaled is not currently available at this time.

Compute

  • Minimum Size
  • 20GB of vRAM
  • 5GHz of vCPU (burst to 10GHz)

Storage

  • Starts at 2TB

Network

  • 10 Mbps of allocated bandwidth
  • 50 Mbps burstable bandwidth
  • 2 Public IPs

vCHS: Backup offering

As an add on option for individual virtual machines users will have the option of enabling backups. This will allow customers to protect their VMs and the data within them from loss. The backup schedule will not be modifiable and at this time is not published. I would assume for now that its something standard like a number of daily backups and a monthly that are kept. Hope to find out more about this in the near future.

At the time of this article a user can enable the backup from the vCHS portal but would have to submit a support request to the vCHS team to restore a backup. In the near future VMware is working on enabling the restore of backups from the vCHS portal.