Well, I mentioned this was coming and thanks to Jeramiah Dooley offering to help out, we finally made it happen! We’ve setup a process and a plan for vExperts to get access on a rolling basis to vCloud Air. There is a lot of details so instead of repeating them, I will give you the pointers to the community links for the main items you need to read.
The main thing I will point out that is also stated in the Program Guide is this will only ever be for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). VMware is absorbing the cost of these VPC’s and tenant for you so we are not able to add all the other services like Disaster Recovery or Data Protection. This is just for folks to get hands on with the vCloud Air setup, interface, Firewall rules, networking, and other aspects. You should get a lot out of this in 30 days for sure.
Also due to Role Based Access you will notice in the documentation that some things will not work like vCAC due to the current level of permissions it requires. We elected to “protect folks from themselves” and keep the integrity of the environment by only allowing selected administrators full rights. Today vCAC requires all administrator permissions in vCloud Air to work, so as you can imagine we did not want that for everyone. However, many of the other API’s should work with other tools.
Lastly you are “On Your Own”. You are all smart people and you thrive on figuring things out. I don’t have the cycles to help people get things going and setup, so if you need help check out the vCloud Air Tutorials first and go from there. Ask your fellow people as well if you get stuck, but I guess I am bluntly saying….go forth and prosper.
