Bluelock

One brief addendum to my last two posts. Our good friend Jake here at BlueLock just sent notice to our crew that the HYPERVIZOR blog had a series of fantastic diagrams detailing VMware's new vCloud Director. I loved them so much I immediately printed them on the good printer, posted them on the wall and wanted to tell our awesome readers right away.

If you're familiar with VMware's vSphere stack you will appreciate the "VMware vCloud Director Cell Architecture" diagram which provides a great visual of how vCloud Director augments the typical vSphere 4.1 stack. Note how vCloud director sits atop of a vCloud pyramid, coordinating services across a virtual infrastructure.

Even if you aren't familiar with vSphere you will dig the "VMware vCloud Director Networking Architecture" diagram that makes pretty the networking isolation I talked about in the context of vApps. While the diagram may initially look busy, you can see patterns start to emerge when you look at things from a wider perspective. Ultimately the technology built on vShield, vNetwork (with its virtual distributed switches) and vCenter have provided an elegant way to allow everyone to manager their own networks at a layer 2 level without worrying about policies affecting other organizations.