What is vCloud Automation Center?

vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) is part of vCloud suite (Enterprise Edition) which provides administrators with the ability to provision and configure storage, network and compute resources across multiple platforms.

It makes life of a cloud administrator easier by allowing them to automate application delivery and simplify the deployment of multi-tiered applications while managing multi-vendor and multi-cloud infrastructures.

VMware offers vCloud Automation Center in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

The goal of vCAC is to deploy and provision cloud services across private & public clouds, physical infrastructures, hypervisors and public cloud providers. The following cloud Platforms are supported by vCAC:

1: vCloud Director (as of version 5.1)

2: Hyper-V

3: XenServer

vCAC also supports Dell DRAC, HP ILO, Cisco’s UCS manager and there’s an integration with NetApp DataOntap.

vCAC Architecture                                       

The architecture of vCAC looks like below

Graphic Thanks to VMware

At the very high level, vCAC architecture can be broken down into following tiers:

• Presentation Tier– The uppermost tier provides an interface to the end-users/consumers who access resources and applications provisioned from the Cloud.