VMware Cloud Director Service is a multi-tenant, policy-driven, self-service platform that enables infrastructure and application provisioning across multiple vCenter deployments and cloud accounts. It provides a centralized portal for managing virtual infrastructure and applications, as well as automating the provisioning and management of resources. We announced support for Google Cloud for Cloud Director Service here.
App Launchpad service offers a self-service portal on VMware Cloud Director Service which enables users to easily deploy and manage their applications. It allows users to deploy and manage applications on top of the infrastructure provisioned through Cloud Director Service, as well as provide a user-friendly interface for application provisioning. The App Launchpad service provides a catalog of pre-configured application templates that can be easily deployed, or users can deploy their own custom applications. This Blog describes how Cloud Providers can leverage Google cloud as one of the cloud infrastructures. With this, Customers will be able to deploy VM applications from App Launchpad Service portal on Google Cloud along with other existing infrastructures. This blog is for Cloud providers, to review how to enable App Launchpad Service for Cloud Director Service with Google Cloud VMware Engine. In this example we will use a Cloud Director Service Instance which has Google Cloud VMware Engine is added as Infrastructure Resource already as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Cloud Director Service Instance with vCenter on Google Cloud Service Engine. 
Figure 2: Register and Activate Cloud Director Service Instance with Google Cloud on App Launchpad Service
Cloud Providers also must link the required customer organization to the new Cloud Director Service Instance on App Launchpad Service as follows:
Figure 3: Link Customer Organization to on-premise Cloud Director Organization on App Launchpad Service.
Once the Cloud Director Service Instance is onboarded with App Launchpad Service, Publish UI plugin to the customer Organization, Publish the required catalog to the On-premise Cloud Endpoint. Following screen shows example of publishing catalog and synchronizing it to a new cloud endpoint.
Figure 4: Cloud Provider Publishing and synchronizing the Catalog ‘multi-cloud-demo2’ to CDS-Multi-Cloud Instance from Figure1
At this point, customer organization and its developers can start consuming the App Launchpad Service UI Plugin from Cloud Director Service Instance to launch Applications. Figure 5 shows organization user launching an application to Cloud Director Service with Google Cloud as an end point.
Please checkout following resources for more information about App Launchpad Service and Google Cloud VMware Engine.
References:
- App Launchpad Service Reference Architecture
- Cloud Director Service Support with Google Cloud
- Feature Friday – App Launchpad Service
- VMware App Launchpad Service Offical Documentation
Originally posted on February 18, 2023 @ 3:17 pm
