vCloud Air is a public cloud computing service built on vSphere from VMware. vCloud Air has three "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) subscription service types: dedicated cloud, virtual private cloud, and disaster recovery. vCloud Air also offers a pay-as-you-go service named Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand.
In April 2017, VMware announced its intent to sell vCloud Air to French cloud service provider OVH.
VMware announced the vCloud initiative at the 2008 VMworld conference in Las Vegas and garnered significant press attention.
At the 2009 VMworld conference in San Francisco vCloud was featured in the vCloud Pavilion. vCloud was also a subject at the 2010 VMworld conference.
On May 21, 2013, the early access program for vCloud Hybrid Service was launched. On August 26, 2013, general availability was announced for vCloud Hybrid Service including features such as DRaaS and Direct Connect.
vCloud Hybrid Service was rebranded to vCloud Air on August 21, 2014. vCloud Air provides a hybrid cloud—a public IaaS that functions as an extension of existing data centers running VMware vSphere, with common management and networking. With the rebrand of the service, they also announced a cloud computing On Demand program that allows users to pay only for what each user needs to use for resources.
vCloud Air Mobile was announced on August 25, 2014 which added the integration of AirWatch and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
On 4 April 2017 French cloud provider OVH announced its intent to acquire VMware vCloud Air Business and all personnel. The acquisition is expected to close in Q2 2017.
Similar to other public cloud providers, vCloud Air supports the concept of regions - or locations, in vCloud terminology - which are typically used for better pricing, to increase application performance or as disaster recovery. vCloud Air is offered to the public in California, Nevada, Texas, Virginia and New Jersey in the United States. Internationally, it is available in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Australia.