Before we begin to create a new organization, let’s define what an Organization actually is within the vCloud Director environment.

Organizations provide resources to a group of users and set policies that determine how users can consume those resources.

Source: vCloud Director Administrator’s Guide

Create an Organization

1. Open the vCloud Director URL and login with the administrator account.
2. Click Create a new Organization under the Quick Start section.
3. Provide a name, full name and optionally a description for this organization. Notice the default organization URL when you provide a name. Click Next.
4. In the LDAP settings you will have 3 options. In my case I used the “Do not use LDAP” option since I don’t have a dedicated LDAP server running. Drawback of this option is that users have to be manually created in the vCloud Director and groups cannot be created.
5. Add local user who will be the Organization Administrator. Click the Add button. Provide the user name and password. Make sure the user has the Organization Administrator role assigned. Provide full name and e-mail address, click OK. Click Next.
6. Choose if this organization will supply catalogs (a library of media and OS templates) to other organizations and click Next.
7. Next, set up e-mail preferences. Choose whether to use the system settings or organization settings. I’m using the system default settings for sending e-mails. Click Next.
8. Configure the policies for the organization.
9. First, set up the vApp and vApp template leases. Choose the Maximum runtime lease (how long vApps can run), Maximum storage lease (how long the vApps are stored before being cleaned up) and the Storage cleanup method. Move to expired items options is of course safer than the permanently delete option.
10. Second, set up the default quotas. Choose a quota for how many VMs a user can store and power on in this organization.
11. Third, set up the Limits. The limits restrict the number of resource operations per user, resource operations per organization and number of simultaneous connections per VM.
12. Finally, set up the password policies. Enabling locking of a user account is a security best practice so I strongly advise to use it.
13. Click Next. Review the settings for the new organization and click Finish to create it.

A new organization will now be deployed.

Allocate resources

Before the new organization can be used it must have resources to utilize. To do this, it has to have a Organization vDC.

1. Click Allocate resources to an organization under the Quick Start section.
2. Select the organization you want to manage and click Next.
3. Select the Provider vDC. Notice that the external network is also selected.
4. Select an allocation model. This option will control the quality of service this Organization vDC will provide and the costs for providing this service. You can choose from Allocation Pool, Pay-As-You-Go, and Reservation Pool. In my case, I choose the Reservation Pool. This means that all of the resources you allocate are immediately committed to the Organization vDC. An extensive description of all allocation models can be found in the vCloud Director Administrator Guide.
5. Next, configure the Allocation model settings. Since I choose the Reservation Pool model, I have set up the settings as depicted in the following picture.
6. Allocate the storage. Select the Storage Profile, add it to the available storage and set the limit. You can also choose the default installation profile, this is the default storage profile used for all virtual machine provisioning operations where the storage profile is not specified.
7. Next, set up the Network Pool and Services. Select the network pool configured in previous part, set the network quota and click Next.
8. Configure the Edge Gateway. This gateway will provide network connectivity the external network. Enter a suggestive name and description. Select the compact or full edge gateway configuration option and enable HA. Click Next.
9. Configure the External Network. Select the external network and click Add. Also, check the “Use default gateway for DNS relay” option.
10. Next, check the “Create a network for this virtual datacenter connected to this new edge gateway” and provide a suggestive network name and description. Enter the gateway address, network mask, provide DSN servers and DNS suffix is any and enter an IP range for the static IP pool which will be used for assigning IP addresses for the VMs.
11. Provide a name and description for the new Organization vDC and make sure it is enabled.
12. Click Next, review the settings and click Finish.

The Organization vDC and a new Organization will be deployed. You can monitor the process in the vSphere Client.

At this point the setup of the configuration looks like depicted below.

Up next, add and publish a catalog. Click here to continue to part 6 where we add and publish a catalog.

Cheers!

– Marek.Z

• vCloud Suite POC Part 1: Introduction

• vCloud Suite POC Part 2: Installing vCloud Director Cell

• vCloud Suite POC Part 3: vCloud Director Configuration
• vCloud Suite POC Part 4: Creating a new Provider vDC