Man, this should require a 1 week assessment!
1. One large datacenter used for 30 business units
OK
2. Currently every unit has their own instance of vSphere with separate licensing, separate vcenter Servers, etc. Some units have lab manager licensed and some don't. Different vmware products are licensed in some units and not in others.
OK
>3. 15 units want to pool their hardware resources into one and be able to share them
That's one of the concepts at the basis of cloud. OK.
>4. Can we install vCloud director in what is to be the pooled vSphere instance, and each team is given their own area in vCloud director - where they >retain licensing only for the products they use in their section, without requiring the entire pooled vSphere cloud to be licensed for everything? For >example, unit 1 uses lab manager and has enough licenses to cover the resources they will use - none of the other 14 units need lab manager. Can they >be segregated an area in vCloud director where they can use lab manager but no one else can use it and no one else has to pay for licenses for it?
vCD is not compatible with Lab Manager. In a way the two products are a bit redundant.. you'll see vCD and Lab Manager shares a lot of concepts.
>5. Another unit wants to use Cisco nexus dvSwitch in their section only - can use of nexus be segrated into one part of the pool only?
Mh... technically you can.. but...
>6. Another unit wants to use lifecyle manager - can vCloud director segrate an area licensed for that?
Lifecycle Manager is not compatible with vCD. You can use vCloud Request manager.
>7. Some units need Enterprise plus licensing and others don't - is this possible?
See Nexus above.
>8. Another unit's admins need total control of phyiscal servers, vms, permissions, etc. and ability to write apps using vmware APIs for their own cluster >with no admin rights or visibility into other parts of the vSphere environment - can vCloud director segregate this for them?
vCD is all about hiding vSphere resources. In your case you'd need to create a new unit call "cloud admin" that will have visibility into both all aggregated vSphere resources + vCD at the Admin level. All the other (15?) units that are supposed to share the resources would be "Organizations" in vCD terms and they would only see abstracted resources (no vSphere resources).
>I realize this is a lot of subject matter
You bet!
Massimo.
Massimo Re Ferre'
VMware vCloud Architect
twitter.com/mreferre
www.it20.info
Massimo Re Ferre'
VMware vCloud Architect
twitter.com/mreferre
www.it20.info
