VMware Cloud Reference Architecture - White Paper

The OpenNebula Cloud Reference Architecture is a blueprint to guide IT architects, consultants, administrators and field practitioners in the design and deployment of public and private clouds based on OpenNebula on top of VMware vCenter. The reference architecture in this paper is intended for organizations with existing VMware environments or expertise who want to limit changes to their underlying VMware infrastructure, but see benefits in a common provisioning layer via OpenNebula to control compute workloads and want to take a step toward liberating their stack from vendor lock-in.

The document has been created from the collective information and experiences from hundreds of users and cloud client engagements. Besides main logical components and interrelationships, this reference documents software products, configurations, and requirements of infrastructure platforms recommended for a smooth OpenNebula installation. Three optional functionalities complete the architecture: high availability, cloud bursting for workload outsourcing, and federation of geographically dispersed data centers.