Virtual Data Centre First Steps
- Tahir Kulelija
- Nicholas Power
Overview
Once you have purchased your Virtual Data Centre it will be availble in a few minutes. Your pool of resources will be ready to go and before you jump straight in and start creating your environment, we recommend you read this page to decide how you want to structure your data centre. This information could save you a lot of time in the future.
Organization
When you purchase your first Data Centre we also create an organisation for you. An organisation is the top level management structure which allows you to run one or more Data Centres. You may want to have separate data centres to manage different business units/customers or possibly different specifications, like faster storage. There is no additional cost to have multiple data centres.
vApps
A vApp is the next layer within the Data Centre. A vApp is collection or container of virtual machines. You may have five VMs for messaging and collaboration, Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Server, Client Access Server, Unified Messaging Server, Hub Transport Server and Edge Transport Server. You can group them together to manage the whole messaging platform. For example, to start and shutdown VMs in a particular order to ensure correct operation.
VMs
VMs are the basic building blocks of Zettagrid. They can be servers, desktops or any operating system that can be virtualised. We sell pre-packaged VM’s as Cloud Servers but in a Data Centre you get access to our Catalogue for you to pick and build yourself.
The Image Catalogue
The Image Catalogue is a library software media (either ISO or OVF files) available to you to build VMs and install software. When you purchase an operating system software license online, say Microsoft Windows 2016, we will make that install media available to you. Linux distributions are available freely straight away.
You can add your own media and vApps to the Catalogue by uploading ISOs via the VMware vCloud management interface.
Other Purchased Software
When you purchase other software licenses from the Zettagrid store (Citrix, SQL Server, Exchange etc) we will mount the media directly to the VM that the software is licensed for. The media can also be uploaded to the catalogue on request.
Management
A Data Centre is managed from within the Zettagrid Cloud Director Portal. Login details are unique to each zone. Your login credentials and availability zone link can be found in My Account.