common denial

Often times for me multi-tenancy is a topic of discussion. The customer wants to build an environment, an apartment building that many people reside in and yet everyone thinks they live there alone. None of the residents are quite sure how big the house is. All they know is that they have their own door that leads to their kitchen, their living room, their bathroom, their bed. Now Tenant A does not want to know that there is a Tenant B or a Tenant C, etc. because they feel safer thinking that the house is all there, there is no sharing. At times, the tenants may not like one another or may be competing against one another. Now for the most part, it is the door that defines the separation. Once Tenant A goes through that door, they see only what they “own”. Even though the underlying electricity, water supply, and plumbing goes to the entire house. Tenant A thinks it is all about them.

In a sense, vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) is the door in to the house. vCAC is the interface that VMware has developed so that you can provide the apartment building to your customers. Sure we already provided the water, the electricity, the plumbing inherently with the hypervisor but now we are building that out. The hypervisor has expanded and now it is no longer a house for one, there are no benefits to that. Now it is about apartments and giving everyone their own door.

Now everyone looks at multi-tenacy differently and when customers ask me about it, I usually follow up with a simple “what are you looking for”. What is your end goal, what is the end need? If you can make more money from building apartments versus building houses, then lets build those apartments together but don’t forget that even though vCloud Director is the multi-tenant interface, vCloud Automation Center can do that too. Multi-tenancy can be done with virtualization, it isn’t something to fear.