Virtualized Cluster

Private Cloud Director enables you to manage and operate multiple virtualized clusters from a single PCD region.

Use Cases

Multi-Tenant Isolation

You can assign different tenants to separate clusters to enforce resource boundaries and fault domain separation. This prevents noisy neighbor issues and enhances security between tenant environments.

Licensing Requirements

Some specialized software like Oracle database may require isolation of hosts with the software license enabled. Creating a separate cluster will allow you to do this.

Hardware Specialization

You can group hosts with similar capabilities (such as GPU-enabled or high-memory machines) into dedicated clusters to optimize specialized workload performance and resource utilization.

Failover Architecture

Define multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within your infrastructure to ensure application redundancy and high availability during planned or unplanned outages.

Cluster Architecture and Management

Understanding Cluster Components

Clusters in Private Cloud Director are built using two fundamental concepts:

1. Host Aggregates: Logical groupings of compute nodes that share common attributes (like GPU capability or SSD storage). Host aggregates are:

   1. Visible only to administrators

   2. Used primarily for intelligent workload scheduling

   3. Tagged with metadata to facilitate resource matching

2. Availability Zones (AZs): Defines fault domains or failure boundaries that:

   1. Are visible to tenants

   2. Provide isolation for disaster recovery planning

   3. Allow for explicit workload placement decisions

All clusters within a region operate under a single global blueprint, ensuring consistency in base configurations while allowing for cluster-specific customization.

Creating a Cluster

Before adding hosts as hypervisors, you must create at least one cluster.

To create a new cluster:

1. Navigate to Infrastructure → Clusters → Add Cluster

2. Provide a name for the cluster.

3. Choose desired settings for:

   1. VMHA (Virtual Machine High Availability)

   2. DRR (Dynamic Resource Rebalancing)

Adding Hosts to Clusters

When adding new hosts to Private Cloud Director:

1. Onboard the Host

   1. Add the host to the Private Cloud Director platform using the standard onboarding process.

2. Assign Hypervisor Role

   1. Select the Hypervisor role

   2. Choose the target cluster that the host should be a part of.

Once assigned, the host will automatically inherit the selected cluster’s configuration, including VM HA and DRR settings.

Each virtualized cluster in Private Cloud Director provides two key features that enable you to run production workloads on the clusters.

Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA)

VM HA provides automatic fault tolerance for your workloads. When enabled:

• The system continuously monitors host health across the cluster

• If a host failure is detected, affected VMs are automatically recovered on healthy hosts

• Downtime is minimized without requiring manual intervention

• Business continuity is maintained even during infrastructure issues

Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR)

DRR works as a continuous optimization engine that:

• Monitors allocated capacity and real-time utilization metrics (CPU, memory) across all hosts within the cluster.

• Analyzes resource distribution patterns to identify imbalances

• Intelligently migrates VMs across hosts in the cluster to optimize resource utilization.

• Prevents hotspots and resource contention before they impact performance

This proactive approach ensures that your clusters maintain optimal performance even as workload patterns change over time.