We are happy to announce that VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 is now Generally Available as of June 23, 2022.  

It introduces various new features based on Providers’ feedback and is specially designed to facilitate their operations while increasing the adoption of their DR and migration services. 

From all the new features, we would like to highlight vSphere to vSphere DR and migration as it increases the options for the provider’s cloud onboarding.

In addition, VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 comes with some new reporting capabilities and even offers one-click migration to simplify the self-service onboarding for tenants. 

vSphere DR and Migration

With all the previous versions of VMware Cloud Director Availability, there was one constant requirement – to have VMware Cloud Director deployed at the Provider’s cloud endpoint.  

However, with 4.4, we add support for clouds only based on vSphere.

To make this possible, we developed two new deployment configurations: 

• vCenter Replication Management Appliance for the cloud site 
• On-premise to Cloud vCenter Replication Appliance for the on-premises site 

When deployed, these appliances also register the VMware Cloud Director Availability vSphere Client Plug-In enabling the replication functionalities directly in the vSphere UI. 

Both appliances need a single VM for their deployment and utilize the same core services for replication and secure communication as a typical VMware Cloud Director Availability setup.  

After pairing an on-premises site to a cloud, the tenant can seamlessly migrate or protect their workloads there. Once failed-over, the protected VMs can also be reversed to the source site when it is restored to operation. 

vSphere to vSphere protections and migrations are metered by vCloud Usage Meter 4.4 and later. The new use cases are mapped to the existing ones.

One-click migration 

VMware Cloud Director Availability is known for being an excellent match for Providers who offer self-service migrations to their tenants because of its multi-tenancy capabilities and ease of use.  

One-click migration further simplifies the tenants’ workflow to migrate their workloads to the cloud. This new feature lets tenants quickly configure a migration directly through their vSphere UI by only providing some basic replication settings and without the necessity to deal with more advanced configurations.  

It is an outstanding feature for inexperienced users who have to perform the migration of their workloads for the first time. 

New reports 

After introducing the DR and Migration plans in our previous release (VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3), we now enhance them by adding the Recovery Plans Execution Reports. These reports are available for both migration and DR plans and provide detailed information about the outcome of each step when the plan finishes its run. 

Another new report in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 can list information about all the RPO violations for a specified time period. This can be especially useful for customers using a low RPO and should be monitored. Reports can be generated for a single organization or for all,  and then exported in several formats – HTML or TSV. 

Other new features 

Following the course from our previous releases, we added several new features that aim to improve VMware Cloud Director Availability usability and operation: 

• Remote site compatibility pre-upgrade check that will show all the paired sites that will become incompatible after the upgrade of the cloud appliances. 

• In-Product Feedback, where both Providers and tenants can submit their feedback for VMware Cloud Director Availability and its features. 
• Cloud collection of support bundles that allows Providers to collect the support bundles of the paired on-premises sites directly from their management UI. 
• Network Extension to VMware Cloud on AWS for stretching an on-premises network to an SDDC hosted at VMware Cloud on AWS making migration simple with fewer post-migration changes necessary. 
• Endpoints resource capacity filter for a better understanding of what resources are needed at the destination cloud to support all the protected workloads. 
• Replication alignment with the destination storage profile for provisioning the disk type of a replicated workload accordingly. 

• Managed service replication assignment, which allows setting the tenant organization instead of the system administrator as the default owner of replications configured by the Provider. 

Upgrade 

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 only supports direct upgrades from 4.2.1 and 4.3.1. For the exact upgrade steps or in case you need to upgrade from an older version, please refer to the official documentation. 

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