Top Resources to Learn about vCloud Director

By David Davis

At VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware's CEO Paul Maritz announced the cornerstone of their private cloud platform – vCloud Director. Formerly known as "Project Redwood", vCloud Director sits above your, potentially, existing virtual infrastructure and allows you to pool those virtual infrastructure resources to allow your IT customers to consume IT in a whole new way. With vCloud Director, this is done with end user portals, catalogs, and security policies that should make your business more agile and reduce costs. vCD is also the a platform that will allow you, one day, to transition to the public cloud or create a hybrid cloud. Without seeing these features for yourself and testing them to visualize the benefits in your own company, this may sound like hype and that's why we all need to spend more time researching, learning, and evaluating vCloud Director for ourselves.

If you are still at the point of trying to figure out what vCloud Director is, make sure that you read more about it on the vCloud Director product page. On the other hand, if you have a base idea about what vCloud Director is and are looking for more resources – read on!

I'm not going to purport to teach you all that you need to know about vCloud Director in this post. Honestly, I'm still learning about it and I am sure that most enterprise customers out there are still trying to visualize how "the cloud" will help them. Instead, what I am going to do is to give you an excellent list of resources that you can study to learn in your own time (many of which I am using myself).

I have broken this list of vCloud Director resources down into categories to help group similar resources together. Here you go:

VMware Official Resources

• VMware vCloud Product Page
• VMware vCloud Director Community Forum
• VMware vCloud Director Developer Community
• VMware vCloud Director Evaluator's Guide
• VMware vCloud Director Documentation
• VMware vCloud Director Security Hardening Guide

vCloud Director Resources on the Web

• Yellow-Bricks.com – Unloading the vCD Agent
• Yellow-Bricks.com – vCD Networking Part 1
• Yellow-Bricks.com – vCD Networking Part 2
• Yellow-Bricks.com – vCD Networking Part 3
• Yellow-Bricks.com – vCD Allocation Models
• Yellow-Bricks.com – Creating a vCD Lab on your Mac / Laptop
• FrankDenneman.com – Provider vCD- Cluster or Resource Pool?
• NTPro.NL / Eric Sloof – VMware vCloud Director Explained
• VMware KB 1026339 – VMware vCloud Director Components
• VMware KB 1026324 – Catalogs in VMware vCloud Director
• Hypervizor.com – Video Guide: Taking VMware vCloud Director for a spin… and on the go!
• Hypervizor.com – Designing your Private Cloud with VMware vCloud Director – part 1
• Hypervizor.com – Migrating your VMs from vSphere to vCloud Director and vice versa
• Hypervizor.com – vCloud Director Networking Architecture Diagram
• Hypervizor.com – vCloud Director Cell Architecture Diagram
• RTFM-Ed.co.UK – Installing VMware vCloud Director -Databases and Certificate Experience
• SearchCloudComputing.com -VMware vCloud Director: Ready for launch by Mike Laverick
• SearchCloudComputing.com -Software and licensing requirements for vCloud Director by Mike Laverick
• SearchCloudComputing.com – Setting up VMware vCloud Director by Mike Laverick
• BOOK: Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4 by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, and Steve Kaplan
• VMware Community Podcast Episode #112 on vCloud Director with Eddie Dinel and John Troyer

vCloud Director Videos on the Web

• VMware Meet the Engineer Video:  vCloud Director Catalogs with Orran Krieger
• VMware Meet the Engineer Video:  vCloud Director Networking with Anupam Dalal
• VMware Meet the Engineer Video:  vCloud Director Security with Serge Maskalik
• VMware Meet the Engineer Video:  vCloud Director Resource Management with Tichomir Tenev

Special Thank You to Haney Michael at Hypervizor.com for the following list of vCD Videos from VMware, on YouTube:

•  Understanding and using the VMware vCloud Director web interface
•  How to configure Oracle databases for use with VMware vCloud Director
•  How to install and configure vShield Manager for use with VMware vCloud Director
•  How to install VMware vCloud Director on the first server
•  How to create Sysprep packages for use with VMware vCloud Director
•  How to attach a vCenter Server to VMware vCloud Director
•  How to create a Provider Virtual Data Center in VMware vCloud Director
•  How to create an Organization within VMware vCloud Director
•  How to create External Networks in VMware vCloud Director
•  How to create a Network Pool in VMware vCloud Director
•  How to add a catalog to an Organization within VMware vCloud Director
•  How to collect diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director

Upcoming vCloud Director Resources

• Upcoming Webcast: October 5, 2010 9AM PDT – Building Secure Private Clouds with VMware vCloud Director
• Upcoming Webcast: October 12, 2010 9AM PDT – VMware vCloud Director: Technical Overview
• Certifications? Today, none of the VCP or VCAP certification cover vCloud Director but I am sure that will change in the near future
• If you will be at VMworld Europe or can watch VMworld sessions online, you should make sure to view session MA7140 covering vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Considerations featuring John Arrasjid and Pang Chen who are both on the VCDX panel and principle architects/consultants at VMware
• Upcoming Book: Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director by John Arrasjid (VCDX #1), Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan, Ben Jin, and Raman Veeramraju (so far, only the cover can be viewed here)

With vCloud Director being a version "1.0.0" product, there will absolutely be many more features and much more maturity from the product over the next few months and years. Along with that, there will be many more vCloud Director resources being release (such as John Arrasjid's book). Stay tuned to my blog posts for more information on vCloud Director!

David Davis is a VMware Evangelist and vSphere Video Training Author for Train Signal. He has achieved CCIE, VCP,CISSP, and vExpert level status over his 15+ years in the IT industry. David has authored hundreds of articles on the Internet and nine different video training courses for TrainSignal.com including the popular vSphere video training package. Learn more about David at his blog or on Twitter and check out a sample of his VMware vSphere video training course from TrainSignal.com!