VMware Cloud Director Availability Disaster Recovery DRaaS Migration VMware Cloud Provider

What’s New in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6

We are happy to announce that VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 is now Generally Available as of June 15, 2023.

This new release combines new functionality with operational improvements to give Cloud Providers and their tenants an even smoother experience while replicating workloads.

Tunnel Appliance High Availability

The Tunnel appliance is responsible for handling all the replication management and data traffic making it a critical part of the VMware Cloud Director Availability architecture. Before 4.6, only a single Tunnel appliance was supported to be part of the setup, which many Cloud Providers considered a potential bottleneck for the quality of their DR services.

The Tunnel Appliance High Availability addresses that concern by allowing a second Tunnel appliance to be deployed. The two operate in Active / Active mode and require an external load balancer (for example, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer).  

In addition to delivering high availability, this new feature might positively impact the performance of the appliances as the traffic will be balanced between them. 
We will publish a blog post shortly to suggest different design options and contain everything concerning the configuration.
Note: This architecture is only available for VMware Cloud Director clouds.

vSphere DR and Migration Improvements

Since introducing the support for dedicated vSphere clouds as a replication destination, we have extended the list of available features with every new release. This one is no exception and brings several significant improvements:

  • Recovery Plans to define the failover order of the replicated VMs the same way it is done for VMware Cloud Director clouds
  • Bandwidth throttling to enforce traffic limits on a specific network interface of the Tunnel appliance
  • Public API, which was missing before. Please check https://developer.vmware.com for a reference

vApp Template Replication

In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3.1, we enabled migrating templates from one catalog to another in the same or a remote VMware Cloud Director cloud.

In 4.6, we enhanced that feature to check for template changes and perform an automated migration if a modification is detected. It can result in overwriting the existing template at the destination catalog or creating a newer version.

New Features to Simplify Operation

Along with all mentioned, we have also improved product management and operability. 

For clouds running VMware Cloud Director 10.3 or later, VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 now supports replicating:

  • The DHCP service on vApp isolated networks
  • Routed vApp networks
  • vApp network services

This means VMware Cloud Director Availability no longer converts routed vApp networks to direct with all network services removed. The same is valid for the isolated where DHCP support is no longer dropped.

There are also some enhancements to the Recovery Settings, leading to a more unified look and feel for all cases:

  • ​For on-premises to cloud replications (Cloud Director destination clouds), the source and the destination networks can be mapped, similarly to cloud-to-cloud replications
  • For vSphere DR and migration:
    • Recovery settings are validated based on the replication settings
    • Source and destination network mappings allow network mapping per VM

Another new feature is the Guest Customization Global Setting, which can control the Guest Customization Settings – activated or deactivated for all new replications. It can still be overwritten through the Recovery Settings of each replication. 

Auditing is also improved with all the new events added to the VMware Cloud Director audit trail, such as logins/logouts, settings changes, appliance configuration, etc. You can review and export these from the VMware Cloud Director Events console. This is extremely useful around the Sovereign Cloud initiative.

The notifications also get refined in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6. The email channel is extended and can now be used for transmitting messages about all the available events and activities, including replication-related information.

In addition, both tenants and Cloud Providers can subscribe to receive a weekly activity summary via email. The Cloud Providers can manually generate this new report through the UI too.

Upgrade

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 supports direct upgrades from 4.4.x and 4.5.x. for Cloud Director clouds and from 4.5.x for vSphere clouds.

For the exact upgrade steps or in case you need to upgrade from an older version, please refer to the upgrade documentation.

Reference

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 Release notes

VMware Cloud Director Availability Interoperability Matrix

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