The vCloud API defines a set of objects common to cloud computing environments. An understanding of these objects, their properties, and their relationships is essential to using the vCloud API.

vCloud API Object Taxonomy
Illustration of the object hierarchy: an Organization that contains two VDC objects, three Catalog objects, two Network objects, and containers for Users, Groups, and Tasks

vCloud API objects have the following high-level properties:

Organizations

A cloud can contain one or more organizations. Each organization is a unit of administration for a collection of users, groups, and computing resources. Users authenticate at the organization level, supplying credentials established when the user was created or imported. User credentials are authenticated by the organization's identity provider. vCloud Director includes an integrated identity provider. It also supports several standards-based external identity providers.

Users and Groups

An organization can contain an arbitrary number of users and groups. Users can be created locally or managed by an external identity provider. Groups must be managed by an external identity provider. Permissions within an organization are controlled through the assignment of rights and roles to users and groups.

Catalogs

Catalogs contain references to vApp templates and media images. You can configure a catalog in several different ways:

as a repository for local content that can remain private to the catalog owner or can be shared with other users, groups, or organizations in your cloud

as a source of published content, to which other clouds can subscribe.

as a local repository for content published by another cloud or any Web site that hosts a VMware Content Subscription Protocol (VCSP) endpoint.

An organization administrator or catalog owner controls catalog sharing. Organization administrators in organizations that have permission to publish catalogs control publication and subscription options for catalogs in their organization. A system administrator can enable background synchronization of catalogs with external sources and set background synchronization schedules to regulate consumption of network bandwidth by this activity.

Organization VDCs

An organization virtual datacenter (organization VDC) is a deployment environment for virtual systems owned by the containing organization, and an allocation mechanism for resources such as networks, storage, CPU, and memory. In an organization VDC, computing resources are fully virtualized, and can be allocated based on demand, service level requirements, or a combination of the two.

Organization VDC Networks

An organization VDC can be provisioned with zero or more networks. These organization VDC networks can be configured to provide direct or routed connections to external networks, or can be isolated from external networks and other organization VDC networks. Routed connections require an Edge Gateway and network pool in the VDC. The Edge Gateway provides firewall, network address translation, static routing, VPN, and load balancing services.

Virtual Systems and Media Images

Virtual systems and ISO-format media images are stored in a catalog and represented as catalog item objects. Virtual systems are stored as templates, using an open standard format (OVF 1.0). These templates can be retrieved from catalogs and transformed into virtual systems, called vApps, through a process called instantiation, which binds a template’s abstract resource requirements to resources available in a VDC. A vApp contains one or more individual virtual machines (Vm elements), along with parameters that define operational details, including:

How the contained virtual machines are connected to each other and to external networks.

The order in which individual virtual machines are powered on or off.

End-user license agreement terms for each virtual machine.

Deployment lease terms, typically inherited from the containing organization, that constrain the consumption of VDC resources by the vApp.

Access control information specifying which users and groups can perform operations such as deploy, power on, modify, and suspend on the vApp and the virtual machines that it contains.

Tasks

Asynchronous operations are tracked by task objects. Running and recently completed tasks initiated by members of an organization are kept on the organization’s tasks list.