As the dust settles from VMworld 2013, more clarity is being provided on VMware’s cloud product strategy regarding vCloud Director and vCloud Automation Center. Here are 2 articles that explain VMware’s roadmap lifecycle for both VMware vCloud Director (vCD) and VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC).
http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2013/09/reports-of-vcloud-directors-death-exaggerated.html
In a nutshell, vCD is being phased out for end-users building their own private cloud. Its functionality will be split between the vSphere stack and up into the vCAC stack.
- vCAC will be the front-end portal to provide multi-tenancy, governance, VM lifecycle management, policy automation and orchestration.
- vSphere will handle the content catalog, virtual data centers, placement of VM workloads, and Network Virtualization.
vCD will still exist, but will be focused as a solution for cloud service providers going forward starting with version 5.6 coming out next year.
The good news is if you already own vCloud Suite Standard or Advanced licenses, you will automatically get vCAC licenses as per your support contract when vCloud Suite 5.5 comes out in a month. The level of vCAC features you get will depend on your license level. vCloud Suite Enterprise already has vCAC included today.
