We are happy to announce that VMware Cloud Director 10.4 is now Generally Available as of July 14, 2022, covering three main themes: Networking & Load Balancing, Operational Improvements and Core Platform.
Let us now understand each of the themes and what are the enhancements.
Networking and Load Balancing
Having better control on the network and adding more load balancing features available under the lower licensing tier in the cloud space is always a big takeaway for the tenant as they can better design the network topology and use maximum load balancing features where possible.
With the networking theme, we now offer the Cloud Director tenant the option to configure static routes and define the next hop. The benefit is that the traffic of vApps using the organization routed network can be controlled and segmented by the administrators resulting in better security.
The other major enhancement we have made is with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
From this release, there is no longer the notion of a Basic and an Enterprise licensed controller. All controllers are now deployed as Enterprise. Cloud Providers can constrain tenants to the Basic feature set, now known as “Standard” in Cloud Director and can allow them to use all the Enterprise feature sets, now known as “Premium” in Cloud Director, all through settings in the portal. Cloud providers can easily control load balancing features used by a tenant with the new feature set option.
VMware Cloud Director 10.4 tenants using NSX Advanced Load Balancer in their environment can now create multiple services on the same Virtual IP (VIP) with different back-end pools under the standard feature set and can also configure multiple ports on the single virtual services, extremely helpful for application services. It also supports the usage of IPV6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) where a pool member can either have an IPV4 (Internet Protocol Version 4) or IPV6 network in a mixed IP mode setup.
Operational Improvements
Moving on to the operational enhancements and visibility improvements. A tenant now has a better view of catalog sync between the primary and the subscriber which will allow the user to know what exactly is happening in the background in terms of file sync operations. Also, the tenant (with view rights) can view the IOPS setting of the storage policy defined on the vCenter Server which will help the administrator to avoid over-subscription and help calculate the right values for better performance from a storage perspective.
In continuation to operational enhancements, previously the API Tokens feature would initiate the task as the user who created the API Token, but now with Cloud Director 10.4 we have introduced the service account feature which can be created on a per-tenant basis by the Cloud Provider or as per the automation requirement which can be created by the organization administrator. The service account users are like regular users with limited access and no UI visibility, providing traceability of API functions. Also, the centralized proxy feature is extended to the tenants.
From an automation perspective, VMware Cloud Director 10.4 will support Terraform 3.7 which can now automate the CSE (Container Service Extension) environment set up with a single click, improving deployment times and minimizing configuration errors. Tenants can now have dev-ready cloud services in minimal time and start deploying the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKGm) cluster, generating more consumption and higher revenues for Cloud Providers.
Core Platform
The last theme for VMware Cloud Director 10.4 updates, core platform features, help Cloud Director tenant users and administrators achieve faster output, better resource utilization, and better planning.
Cloud Director 10.4 now supports the instantiation of the vApp template across organizations backed by different vCenter Servers eliminating the timely OVA Export and Import operation just by using an NFS shared storage between the vCenter Server. And as a Cloud Provider, it is now easier to migrate the workload from an old datacenter to a new datacenter without having shared storage between the datacenters.
VMware Cloud Director 10.4 now can better place a virtual machine on a vCenter Server SDRS enabled cluster due to which the datastore free space assessment and provides better storage utilization as well as faster placement. Along with this, the most awaited feature of migrating a fenced NSX-V (NSX for vSphere) backed vApp Template to NSX-T backed organization is now possible via the API.
Lastly, the VMware Cloud Director appliance is now upgraded to Photon OS 3.0 which provides better security and includes critical library updates. Also, the console proxy is merged with the HTTP proxy which means we can optionally or by default use a unified console proxy for both HTTP and VM console. This allows the cloud administrators a simpler configuration from a load balancer and certificates perspective.
Note: This is a best-effort report with an informative purpose only because it might not include 100% of the violations due to some technical limitations.
Other Useful Resources:
To find out more about VMware Cloud Director 10.4, please use the following resources: Release notes, Product Documentation.
Alternatively have a look at the Web Page and the VCD 10.4 Datasheet, VCD Briefing Paper and What’s New Demo.
Remember, to get the latest updates, check this blog regularly, you also can find us on Slack, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as many demo videos and enablement on YouTube, especially our Feature Fridays series.
