How to enable Elastic Virtual DataCenters in vCloud Director

I have been playing around with my home lab today, and trying to work out how to enable Elastic Virtual Data Centers within vCloud Director.

First of all, what is an Elastic vDC you ask? An Elastic vDC allows you to add more resources to a Provider vDC when they become consumed/constrained.

Why would you need to do this? Well first off this only works with the Pay-as-you-go Allocation model. Pay-as-you-go is exactly that, you have no idea as a provider on how many VMs will be deployed. Potentially there is the possibility that all your resources will be consumed, and your consumers will not be able to deploy any more workloads. This is where Elastic vDCs come in, you can add more resources to a PvDC on the fly. So how do we do it?

1. Log in to vCD as a system admin
2. Click the “Manage & Monitor” button
3. Expand “Provider vDCs”
4. Highlight the PvDC you want to expand, right click and select “Open”
   
5. Navigate to the far right tab “Resource Pools”, this will show the mapped resource pool for that PvDC.
6. Right Click and Select “Add Resource Pool”.  You will be presented with a window showing available Resource Pools.
7. Select the Resource Pool you would like to expand to and click Finish.  Note: As a best practice VMware recommends only mapping PvDCs to Clusters not Resource Pools.
8. Once the tasks have run and vCD has configured the resource pools you will see your second resource pool displayed.  
9. Thats it.  Completed.  You have now expanded your PvDC on the fly.