Create a vCloud Director Solution

Owned by Matteo Iacovitti
Last updated: Oct 11, 2018

Solutions are the products that you create for clients to purchase. These products can be either an Organization Virtual Datacenter (Org vDC) or an NSX Edge Gateway (Edge).  Solutions also contain pricing information, as well as contracts that can offer time-based discounts for all or certain clients.

For vCloud Director, there are four Solutions you can create:

  • Allocation Modal vDC - A percentage of the resources you allocate from the provider vDC are committed to the Org vDC
  • Reservation Modal vDC - All the resources you allocate are immediately committed to the Org vDC
  • Pay-As-You-Go vDC - Resources are committed only when users create vApp’s in the Org vDC
  • NSX Edge Gateway - A virtual router for Org vDC networks. You can configure it to provide network services such as firewall, NAT, IPSEC and SSL VPN, and Load Balancing.

To begin, click on the service provider drop-down link in the left pane, then select solutions. This will bring you to the Solutions page.



Click on the “Add” button to create a new solution using the following steps.


The first step is to add the General Information. This includes:

  • The name of the solution
  • A description of the solution
  • The delivery type:
    • Physical – e.g. on premise, physical server instances or other physical material delivered in a solution;
    • Digital - virtualized server instances
  • The currency the solution will be priced in
  • A logo to visually describe the solution
  • If the solution is available to the client or not (enable/disable purchase ability)


Once you have filled in all the information, click on the specs icon.

 The second step consists of four parts.

  1. Select an Automator solution.

  2. Select the Automator type and the Automator.
    In this case, choose vCloud Automator, and the Automator would be the same one you created in Part 1. (If you created multiple Automator’s, choose the one the solution will be using for its resources.) Next, choose the solution type - Allocation, Reservation, Pay-As-You-Go or Edge Gateway.
  3. Select the Provider vDC that the solution will use for its resources.
  4. Select your specs.
    Each spec has a gear icon beside it. This allows you to it billable or non-billable and choose whether the spec is a required value or not.

Allocation modal solution


The Allocation Modal solution type allows you to choose how much of a certain resource the client can reserve. For Allocation, you can also indicate the percentage that is reserved for the client.

For example, if the client purchases 10GB of RAM and the RAM guarantee percentage is 15%, then the client is guaranteed 1.5GB of RAM. The other 9.5GB is based on the remaining resources of the Provider vDC.

You can set RAM, compute, and the speed of each vCPU, and adjust the resource guarantee percentage for RAM and CPU.

Select which network pool the solution will use for organization networks, and which storage policy (or policies) the solution will use for storage. You can also determine if the storage will be thin provisioned, fast provisioned, both, or neither.

Once completed, click “Save”.

Reservation modal solution

The Reservation Modal is like an Allocation Modal, except there is no resource guarantee percentage. The client gets 100% of the resource. You can select the range of RAM and CPU the client can make available for that vDC.

Select which network pool the solution will use for organization networks, and choose which storage policy (or policies) the solution will use for storage. You can also determine if the storage will be thin provisioned, fast provisioned, both, or neither.

Once completed, click “Save”.

Pay-as-you-go modal solution

The Pay-As-You-Go Modal is like Allocation Modal in that it uses resource guarantee percentage, but it also allows you to set each resource to unlimited usage. This means that the client can use the entire provider vDC resource. The client will be charged based on the usage of the vApps and VMs in that Org vDC.

Select the range for RAM, CPU and the guaranteed percentage for each, along with the vCPU speed.  If you select unlimited, you do not need to add a range.  The solution will use the entire provider vDC.

Select which network pool the solution will use for organization networks, and which storage policy (or policies) the solution will use for Storage. You can also determine if the storage will be thin provisioned, fast provisioned, both, or neither.

If you select unlimited, you do not need to add a range since the solution will use the entire storage policy. You can also determine if the storage will be thin provisioned, fast provisioned, both, or neither.

Once completed, click “Save”.

NSX edge gateway solution

The NSX Edge Gateway Solution allows your client to deploy an Edge Gateway into their Org vDC. You can setup the Edge’s size, which external network it will attach to, and other features.

The sizes you can choose from are (RAM, CPU, Storage):

  • Compact – (0.5GB, 1GHz, 500MB)
  • Large – (1GB, 2GHZ, 500MB+512MB)
  • Quad Large – (1GB, 4GHZ, 500MB+512MB)

You can also setup enabled or disabled configurations for the client as a default.

The current features HyAlto offers for NSX Edges are:

  • High Availability
  • Load Balancer
  • IPSec VPN
  • SSL VPN-Plus

Once you have selected your features, click “Save”.


Tutorial Video