Virtual datacenters

In your ThinkAgile CP infrastructure, applications are deployed in virtual datacenters. A virtual datacenter (VDC) is a logical grouping of compute and storage resources allocated from one or more migration zones and one or more storage pools, usually to a business unit in an organization. In the ThinkAgile CP environment, the virtual datacenter is the ultimate organizing construct to manage allocations and give you visibility into your infrastructure.

Infrastructure admin users can create specific datacenters that include the precise allocation of compute, storage, and network resources they need. Your users can allocate storage and create as many applications as they need without assistance from a storage or virtualization administrator. It is easy to set up and makes cloud administration easy.

A virtual datacenter must have compute and storage allocations and network connectivity before it can be used to deploy application instances. The compute and storage allocations must come from connected resources. You can specify the connectivity among migration zones and storage pools; an application can run in a migration zone that is connected to a storage pool on which it is provisioned in the virtual datacenter. You also define the compute allocation you need in the virtual datacenter; at the physical level, you define compute resources into categories and tags, but how those resources are used is dictated at the virtual datacenter level.

Figure 1. Creating virtual datacenters.

When creating a virtual datacenter in Cloud Controller, you allocate CPU and memory from one or more migration zones to the virtual datacenter (you can allocate the CPU and memory based on categories you previously defined).

The ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller Allocations page displays the total and available resources in your infrastructure to help you decide how many resources to allocate to your virtual datacenters. This makes it easy to change properties on-the-fly, for example, to increase computing power or storage capacity for your virtual datacenter as needed.

Figure 2. VDC Allocations page

For more information about creating and managing virtual datacenters in ThinkAgile CP, see the following topic:

Working with virtual datacenters