Introduction to Tenant
vApps
The vApp is a management construct that
encapsulates one or more virtual machines running in the vSphere environment.
The tenant vApp is a higher-level construct that allows vCloud Director to
manage vApps and virtual machines running in a multi-tenant datacenter, or in a
multi-tenant cloud, based on vSphere.
Figure 1
shows the objects within a single organization that you can access with the
vCloud API.
vCloud API Object
Taxonomy
Multi-tenant and self-service capabilities of
vCloud Director provide multiple levels of protection for a vApp. A service
provider can offer vApp protection at the system level, the tenant level, or
the end-user level, managed by the system administrator, Organization
administrator, and end user, respectively. This chapter focuses on the
protection provided at the system level, where service providers can employ
backup solutions from vendors of data protection software.
This chapter describes how to design software to
back up and restore the vApps in a vCloud. To back up or restore a vApp, you
need to deal with both the vCloud configuration and the virtual machines that
belong to the vApp. In vSphere, a virtual machine is represented by
configuration files and virtual disk files.