In our last post Creating and configuring Organizations we have created a new organization and went through the configuration settings. In this post we will see how to allocate resources to an organization.

Basically allocating resources means configuring org vDC’s and org vDC will be deriving their resources from Provider vDC (PvDC).

Lets begin with configuring the org vDC in this post.

Login to vCloud Director web interface and navigate to Home Tab and select item no 6 “Allocate resources to an organization“

A new wizard named “New Organization vDC” will be launched and the very first option that you will be presented is selecting the organization to which you want to allocate resources.

Select the organization from the list (I have only one in my home lab) and hit Next.

The next screen present you with option to select the Provider vDC. As the name suggests Provider vDC is the candidate which provides the resources to any org vDC. All the resources (Network/Compute/Storage) is pooled at the PvDC and a subset of the pooled resources is presented to the Org vDC’s.

I have already created a PvDC by name “Prod-vDC” in my home lab. selecting the PvDC will highlight the available External Networks that are present in this PvDC.

Hit Next to continue.

The next page offers you to select the allocation model for the resources. There are 3 allocation model available:

a: Allocation Pool: Only a percentage of the resources you allocate are committed to the organization vDC. You can specify the percentage, which allows you to overcommit resources.

b: Pay-As-You-Go: Allocated resources are only committed when users create vApps in the organization vDC. You can specify the maximum amount of CPU and memory resources to commit to the organization vDC.

c: Reservation Pool: All of the resources you allocate are committed to the organization vDC.

If you want to go in much depth about understanding the allocation model then I would recommend reading articles VCD Allocation Models by Duncan Epping and Understanding Allocation Models by Magnus Anderson.

The easiest method is to use “Reservation Pool” allocation model and since I am very new to vCloud Director I am going ahead with same in my home lab.

The next page allows you to do the real configuration. You will be asked to configure 3 settings here:

CPU allocation: Amount of CPU in GHz that will be reserved for this Org vDC. I have selected 2 and selecting this is telling me I am using 24% of total available cpu from my Provider vDC as my PvDC has total 8.45 GHz cpu power.

Memory allocation: Amount of RAM in GB ythat will be reserved for this Org vDC. I have selected 6 GB and it says it will reserve 65% of total available RAM from PvDC.

Max Number of VM’s: This setting dictates what will be the max number of running VM that can be created using the resources which we just reserved. Unlimited here means you can create “n” number of machines till you exhaust all the CPU/RAM resources reserved for your Org VDC.

There is a table below which shows the calculation of % of resources that have been reserved for this Org vDC and what is available at the PvDC.

Hit Next to continue.

The next setting in this wizard is to “Allocate Storage”. You should have created storage profiles in advance before creating Org vDC then only you will be able to select the storage tier for your Org vDC. I don’t have any storage profile created in my lab so I went ahead with what is available default.

Once you select your storage tier hit the Add button to add that tier for use by your Org vDC

If you are planning to use “Thin Provisioning” select the check box and it will allow you to over commit the storage while creating vApp/VM’s

If you are looking for faster deployment of VM’s from vApp Templates then you should select “Enable fast provisioning“. It will let you create linked clone VM’s within matter of seconds.

Once you are done with settings hit next to continue. Next page in this wizard allows you to select the Network Pool to be used by your Org vDC.

I am not going to use any Network pool in my environment so I went ahead with Next available setting by hitting Next.

Next is to configure the Edge gateways. I am not using any edge network as of now so I left it blank and moved forward.

Next option is to name your Org vDC.

For my lab I am using the name Dev_VDC. Hit Next to go to ready to complete page.

Review your settings on “Ready to Complete” page and hit finish.

After hitting finish I can see the status of the newly created Org vDC in “Manage and Monitor” tab under “Organization vDC” and as visible in below screenshot it is showing as creating.

In recent tasks pane on my vCenter Server I can see some tasks have been triggered while Org vDC is in process of creation.

Also under VM and template view I can see some new folders added by the name “Developers (my organization name)” and “Dev_VDC (my org vDC name)”

Also now in vCloud Director console it is showing that my Org vDC have been created now.

The Next task is to attach a network to this Org vDC so that when a vApp/VM is deployed they can communicate with each other.

In my lab I am directly connecting my Org vDC to the External Network which is on the IP Subnet: 10.0.0.x

From Manage and Monitor tab click on the Organization vDC and select your org vDC which you created.

A new tab will be open. Navigate to 2nd last tab which says “Org vDC Networks” and click on the + button to attach a network

From “Select Network Type” select the option Connect directly to external network and hit next.

Give a name and description for this external network.

On Ready To Complete page review your settings and hit finish.

Now you can see an external network attached to your vDC

In next post of this series we will learn to create and publish catalogs.