vCloud Automation Center 6.0 (VCAC) Details Unveiled

VMware VCAC 6.0 has been announced during VMworld Barcelona 2013. vCloud Automation Center is automation product for cloud infrastructures, which allows through policy based blueprint, an automatic delivery of multi-tier applications or rather services, based on a catalog. Those services are self-service based and offers to the IT provide to through the catalog, a personalized services which can be consumed by the users.

VCAC product can automate the deployment of workloads for different physical or virtual platforms, or Cloud infrastructures provided by Cloud services providers, vCloud hybrid service by VMware and Amazon Web services:

• vSphere
• Hyper-V
• Citrix Xen
• Red Hat
• OpenStack

vCloud Automation Center 6.0 – Deployment of applications with their dependencies!

VCAC 6.0 enables to deploy applications with their dependencies. It means that by specifying in the blueprint what's the topology of such an application, the IT manager can prepare ahead how the application will get deployed and which components will be part of the application (it's kind of vApp, where the web server sits on one VM and DB on another server…. etc…). An Application Director is used for this process. You can see a screenshot from the UI of the Application Director below:

There is much less manual steps as much of the process is automated. The components of the blueprint are reusable, so there is no need to re-create them over and over again.

The blueprint act as a template, where the applications are then deployed in exactly the same way each time the blueprint is called. No differences or miss-configurations as in manual process.

The deployment process are stored in profiles so any changes that comes in can be integrated into app deployment profile and those changes are reflected on the blueprint and during the automated deployment.

If there is a problem found, there is a possibility to do a rollback as you can see on the image bellow….

vCloud Automation Center 6.0 capabilities:

• Re-using application blueprints for provision consistent environments across hybrid clouds
• Promote or roll-back consistent changes across environments (AWS, vSphere, vCloud Hybrid services)
• Multi-tenancy
• Using policies to govern environments
• Automating application release process