Back in August we announced the release of VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, and it’s been a whirlwind ride ever since! So it is with great excitement today that we announce the release of the next version, vCloud Availability for vCloud Director 1.0.1.
Exclusively offered through vCloud Air Network service providers, the vCloud Availability product family is designed for the pressing concerns of both VMware service providers and our mutual customers. Organizations worldwide need cloud-based data protection options more urgently than ever, but this isn’t a “one size fits all” problem with a single solution. Service providers and customers both need to first understand their business and technical needs, and then ensure that they are using the right protection solution for the task at hand.
In the case of vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, what we’ve seen is that VMware providers and VMware customers are gravitating towards the simplicity of a vSphere Replication-based solution. It’s extremely simple for VMware customers to leverage vSphere Replication and then simply connect to a service provider running a DR service powered by VMware vCloud Availability. (How simple? Take a look at this YouTube video demo to see what vSphere Replication looks like from the customer perspective, and how easy it is to connect to Service Provider cloud.)
To build on our theme of simplicity, one of the enhancements in vCloud Availability for vCloud Director 1.0.1 that we’re most excited about is the new vCloud Availability Portal. It’s a sleek HTML 5 interface that provides a simple, streamlined view of replicated VMs, and the ability to perform key operations, such as test and failover, from the service provider side. It’s all part of a unified, consistent view of replicated and failed over VMs across all interfaces – the vSphere Replication interface, vCloud Director, and the vCloud Availability Portal.
We love technology, so we also gravitate towards the technical benefits. But how does this look from a business perspective, and an operational perspective? These are the questions that we usually consider:
- If a service provider already has a replication solution in place, why consider adding vCloud Availability? Cloud-based disaster recovery is not one-size-fits-all, but is all about the right tool for the job. VMware market research, based on an extensive survey of hundreds of customers, has demonstrated that a service providers can increase both market share and margin with a clearly differentiated portfolio of disaster recovery services.
- Operationally speaking, how complex is this solution to manage? For example, what happens when a customer upgrades vCenter, say from vCenter 5.1 or 5.5 to 6.0, or from vCenter 6.0 to vCenter 6.5? No matter what version of vCenter the customer is using (from vCenter 5.1 to 6.5), it’s all compatible with the same vCloud Availability-powered DR service.
- What happens when a customer needs to do a “one way failover” – a migration – to a service provider cloud? vCloud Availability for vCloud Director 1.0.1 introduces an enhanced migration workflow to make that process simple too. VMware customers know that they need to quickly and easily run vSphere wherever makes the most sense for their business and technical needs – whether on-premises, in a service provider cloud, or both.
To expand a bit on that last point – according to IDC*, 2016 was the cross-over year where the spend on service provider data center construction finally surpassed the spend on enterprise data center construction – and service provider data center construction is projected to continue to pick up steam in 2017 and beyond. Fortunately for VMware customers worldwide, the combination of vSphere Replication and vCloud Availability makes a great on-ramp to the cloud.
So, whether it’s protecting vSphere workloads with the simplicity of vSphere Replication-based DR to a vCloud Air Network service provider cloud, migrating workloads directly to cloud, or even running the primary instance in the cloud and easily maintaining a replicated copy on-premises (reverse cloud DR), vCloud Availability for vCloud Director is the right tool for the job.
- VMware customers can learn more about how easy it is to set up vSphere Replication, and also find vCloud Air Network Service Providers offering vCloud Availability near you.
- VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers can learn more about launching vCloud Availability-powered DR services, as well as the benefits of offering more than one differentiated service in their Disaster Recovery portfolio (includes link to ROI calculator).
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