vCloud Director orchestrated infrastructure provisioning featuring NetApp vCO plug-in preview

Abhinav Joshi from NetApp has written a detailed article on what the orchestration demonstrations showcased during VMworld 2010 San Francisco. These were featuring vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 with the addition of:

• VMware vCloud Director vCO plug-in technical preview
• NetApp Provisioning Manager vCO plug-in technical preview
• NetApp FlexClone vCO plug-in technical preview

And matching applications.

Quoting the original article with the vCO demos:

Demo 1: Automated and orchestrated provisioning of infrastructure resources and virtual datacenters in VMware vCloud Director

To be highly scalable, elastic, and efficient, cloud solution demands tiers of compute, and storage service offerings (known as virtual datacenters in vCloud Director) to be rapidly provisioned & available for on-demand consumption by different tenants. This rapid provisioning of the infrastructure resources and virtual datacenters in vCloud Director can only be efficiently achieved with complete end-to-end workflow orchestration. This demo showcases the integration between NetApp Storage Service Catalog capability in Provisioning Manager , VMware vCO, vCloud Director, and vSphere to achieve this objective, and allows the cloud teams to more efficiently meet the ever growing demands of new and existing tenants.

Demo 2: Rapid provisioning and availability of space efficient VMs and vApps in vCloud Director leveraging NetApp FlexClone

Tenant requirements in the cloud can be very dynamic and elastic. Clouds demand 100s of space efficient VMs to be provisioned and available quickly as the tenant business needs grow or as new tenants are added to the cloud. This demo showcases the integration between NetApp FlexClone, VMware vCO, vCloud Director, and vSphere to allow fully automated, rapid provisioning and availability of 100s of tenant VMs in tenant virtual datacenters in vCloud Director. This integration, combined with the NetApp primary storage deduplication, thin provisioning, NetApp Flash Cache and FlexShare enable the clouds to be very scalable, elastic, and cost efficient.

Large service providers and enterprise customers require such end-to-end orchestration workflows to go beyond the VM / vApp life-cycle management with automating the provisioning of the underlying layers including the vSphere virtual infrastructure but also the storage, network and servers across different vendors. As such NetApp may become the first VMware partner to release a plug-in for vCO.