Tag: quotas

Quotas and Quota Policies in VMware Cloud Director

In this article I want to highlight a new neat feature in VMware Cloud Director 10.2 – the ability to assign quotas and create quota policies.

This can be done at multiple levels both by service provider or organization administrator.

The following resources today can be managed via quotas:

  • Memory
  • CPU
  • Storage
  • All VMs (includes vApp template VMs)
  • Running VMs
  • TKG Clusters

The list might expand in the future so you can easily find what quota capabilities are available via API.

The service provider can create quotas at the organization level in the Organization > Configure > Quotas section:

The org administrator can assign quota to individual users or groups. This is done from the Administration > Access Control > User or Group  > Set Quota section.
The assignment of a quota at the group level is inherited by each group user (so it is not enforced at the aggregate group level) but can be overridden at the individual user quota level. Also if a user is member of multiple groups the least restrictive combination of participating group quotas will be applied to her.

At the same place the user or org admin can see the actual user’s usage compared to the quota.

Org admins can use quotas to easily control good behavior of org users (not running too many VMs concurrently, not consuming too much storage, etc.), while system admins can set safety quotas at org level when using Org VDC allocation models with unlimited consumption with Pay per use billing.

One hidden feature available only via API is the ability to create more generic quota policies that can combine (pool) multiple quota elements and use those to assign them to organizations, groups or individual users. Think of quota policy: Power User vs Regular User, where the former can power on more VMs.

When a specific quota is assigned at the user/group/org object, quota policy is created in the backend anyway but is specific just to the one object, while edit of Power User quota policy would be applied to every user that has such quota policy.

The feature comes with new specific rights so can be easily enabled or disabled:

  • Organization: Manage Quotas of Organization
  • Organization: Edit Quotas Policy
  • General: View Quota Policy Capabilities
  • General: Manage Quota Policy
  • General: View Quota Policy