Thursday, February 3, 2011

vFabric on vCloud - meet the vFabric cluster vApp (episode 1)

In this first episode of "vFabric on vCloud" I'll introduce you to the end user experience. Our end user here is an architect/developper/devops for the cloud scale application challenge that Octo runs with VMware and Steria - but the demonstration is fairly generic.

The user is having access to the VMware powered platform through vCloud Director, over the internet using its web browser.
He has access to a pre-provided vApp - a set of 4 vFabric VM and one utility VM that are wired on a private network and can be managed as a whole entity by the user (start, stop, suspend etc) but also by the underlying cloud provider or organization manager if needed.
Once started, the user is having access to its 5 VM over a secured SSH and can then create a tunnel to access for example the vFabric Hyperic web UI in a secured fashion even with use of default password.


In our example, the vApp has been pre-provided through a vApp template by the organization manager. It encapsulates all best practices and ensure isolation yet flexibility for a multi tier application environment.
Depending on roles we could have given the user more freedom to create his own vApp(s) based on quotas limits and catalog access where our VM and vApp templates are listed.

In a next episode we will look at part 2 of the user experience - few seconds after a vFabric VM cluster boot where all the vFabric cloud application platform gets accessible, manageeable, and dynamic and elastic.

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