What licensing is required to use vCloud Air?

What type of licensing is required to run workloads in vCloud Air? Is it just vSphere and vCenter or is vCloud Director also needed?

Just ahead of several cloud-related announcements at VMworld 2014, VMware announced that it was rebranding its vCloud Hybrid Service to vCloud Air. The vSphere-based platform did not undergo any technical changes and will remain an infrastructure as a service hybrid cloud offering.

Currently, vCloud Air provides three cloud services -- dedicated cloud, virtual private cloud and disaster recovery as a service -- than can be managed in vCenter, vCloud Automation Center or vCloud Director (vCD).

While vCD can be used to manage your vCloud Air service, it's not a requirement.

"We get that question a lot. 'To do this, do we need vCloud Director?' No. The whole future of your private cloud is all vSphere-based. You can do all this with vSphere and a vCloud Air subscription," said David Hill, senior technical marketing architect at VMware.

Hill clarified the requirements during his VMworld 2014 session entitled "How to Build a Hybrid Cloud -- Steps to Extend Your Data Center" with Chris Colotti, principal technical marketing architect at VMware.

"With this the only thing that is required is your on-premises vSphere licensing," said Colotti. "If you're signed up for the beta of [vCloud Air] OnDemand, all of the same functionality that we've talked about -- from an edge gateway, networking -- exists in OnDemand, exactly the same. The only other requirement is to have a subscription or OnDemand beta -- some access to vCloud Air."

The vCloud Air OnDemand offering is a pay-as-you-go model for on-demand access to vCloud Air.