What Can I Run On vCloud Air?

At every VMUG or other community presentation I always get asked the question, “So what can I run on vCloud Air?”.  Well being the caring wise guy you all know I am, my response is always a question back.  What CAN’T you run on vCloud Air?  I jest, but in most cases the answer is pretty simple.  I will leave out the obvious licensing questions and considerations of course.  The real answer is there is nothing you are already running on vSphere on premise that you “Technically” couldn’t run on vCloud Air.

vCloud Air Is vCloud Suite

Let’s not forget that vCloud Air is in fact the vCloud Suite for all purposes here.  It’s vSphere ESX as the hypervisor with vCloud Director and VXLAN backed network pools.  It’s using vCloud Networking and Security so you have an incredible amount of advanced networking features which I plan on showing later.  The bottom like is if you have an application running on vSphere in-house, you can move that workload to vCloud Air.  You get all the same fundamental “goodness” you know and love except you leave the infrastructure management to us.

Virtualization First Policy?

How many of you have a “Virtual First” Policy?  I would contend that depending on the request, you could also have a vCloud Hybrid First Policy by default.  If you have already accepted that any new workload will be virtualized, there may be nothing preventing you from running that new workload in a vCloud Air virtual datacenter.  Assuming of course you configure your networking and infrastructure first.  Once those are in place a new workload with a new IP address will run just happily and does the user need to know where it’s actually getting its compute?

Give Me An Example of Something Running on vCloud Air

That’s an easy one.  How about a web server with a database back-end, such as WordPress?  What about a popular blog site you might be reading right now that’s a simple two tier architecture with separate networks and proper firewall rules in place?  That’s right I have so much faith in vCloud Air, that this technical blog will be running here for a little bit just to let people know that something real is on there.  This site is not “Test/Dev”, it’s real and live and people read it every day.  It may not be the biggest out there but it’s a perfect example of Infrastructure as a Service with a simple application.  I will be expanding on the vSphere to vCloud Air setup as we build out a new lab for our team.  I will also talk more about the importance for vSphere folks to understand how to write firewall rules and why it’s important to understand the concepts.  As you can see below nothing works without rules.