Multi tiered, multi tenancy, cloud environment

[Syngress]

Being mainly a networks guy (With a little ESXi experience) I have been tasked with creating a Proof of Concept for a private cloud offering that the business wants to offer to it's partners.

So I am looking for some advise if anyone knows of an overlay to ESXi that will allow for Multi Tenancy, but to 3 levels. As the SP we have overall view of everything, and then each Partner level has a view of their customers only, and obviously customers only get to see their own level. I have been pointed in the direction of 2 pieces of software the 1st is Abiquo, whilst this handles the tenancy pretty well, it has issues with external storage that isn't NetAPP (We will be using EMC VNX's). The other is VMWares own Vcloud Director, this works well with the storage and everything else you would except, but I am yet to fully figure out the tenancy piece, it will handle 2 levels, but not the 3 needed so well.

As far as the hardware is concerned Compute will be based on a couple of HP c7000 blade chassis, which will be located in diverse datacentres. Storage will be EMC's VNX's again in each location. So any ideas about how to handle failover would also be great Networking is straight forward for me

I knew I shouldn't have mentioned I had messed around a bit with ESXi a year or so ago

 

[Ringiho]

I think you should be able to use vCloud to do what you want.

You'd 'own' the Provider vDC, give access to the partner on a Organisation vDC and then allow the customer to see a specific vApp within that Org vDC. The only part I'm not sure on (as this isn't something we do on ours) is that if you were allowing multiple customers to login to the Org vDC if they were able to see the other vApps within a that Org vDC.

Another solution would be to give the Partner multiple Org vDC's, one for each of the customers. This would totally separate everything but keep that partners customers contained in an easy to view way for both them and you.

Hope that makes sense

As for the failover side of things, not 100% sure. Something like Zerto might be worth looking at, as it integrates with vCloud.

Good luck though - this is a big bold project to work on. Roll up those sleeves and wait for the long nights

 

[Syngress]

Thanks Ringiho!!

It is a massive undertaking, and a lot of fun to be honest I am currently wading through PDF's about vCloud.

The long nights have already started!!

 

[Ringiho]

I had one last night, 8.30am to 5.00am. Welcome to the world of Cloud Computing!

I've not touched any other products like vCloud but from what I've seen, more from the newer versions (5.5), it is a good product. Giving it to customers is also good as it can be fairly 'idiot-proof'.

Get it installed and see how you get on. VMware have some good documentation on it. Make sure you have a plan of things like naming schemes before you get going!

 

[Deleted member 138126]

You should be able to handle the bottom layer with permissions. In vCenter you only see what you have permission to see.