VMware vCloud Director for Lab Environment Management

[lcaccamo]

Trying to setup a vCloud Director Environment to manage our labs. We are running on the following platform

4 hosts running on BL460c HP blades in a HP c3000 chassis

2 CPU's in each with 6 cores per processor (hyper threading turned on)

esxi 5.1

64GB of Memory in each host

PS6100XV Storage Area network

I am relatively new to vCloud director and this is the first environment I have built on my own

My requirement is to setup a physical network (eventually more than one) with physical front end systems. I want to offer vApps (in this case a single VM) to my developers that they can spawn as needed. I will have a "lab manager" that will organize time in the physical environment and route vAPPS through accordingly based on a schedule. The NAT'd external address will always be the same address 10.120.1.65. So the physical client in the external network will also have a static IP that will never change (10.120.1.100)

Question 1: Are my goals realistic?

We met with vmware about licensing and they suggested esxi enterprise and vcloud diretor however I don't have the ability to create distributed switches with enterprise licensing.

Question 2: Are my goals realistic with enterprise (not enterprise plus)?

Thanks for reading and any help would be appreciated

[cfor]

I think the overall goals are realistic, however some challenges will exist.

Without DVS you will need to create port groups in advance, and that can be a bit of a pain to manage, but it can be done if this is a small setup. (Double check with VMware to make sure they still support this option)

Some quick searches for PortGroup backed networks:

VMware vCloud Director Documentation Center

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102630...

Hope this gets you started.