Simplicity and usability are key for a product to be successful. With every next release, we strive to deliver consistently new features that improve the overall experience for Cloud Providers and their tenants. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5 is no exception to that – we have plenty of new features focused on helping Cloud Providers deliver a better service.

Automated Backup

VMware Cloud Director Availability appliance backups are not something new, but their automation is. As a new feature in 4.5, system administrators can now schedule the generation of encrypted backup archives for their VMware Cloud Director Availability appliances. For that, there is a new menu called Scheduled Backup Archives.

As part of the scheduling wizard, a remote trusted SFTP server needs to be specified where the archives will be securely uploaded. The supported authentication methods are by using server credentials or a public key. 

The backup interval can be between 30 minutes to 1 week.

Once the schedule is configured, it can be modified and the destination SFTP server can be untrusted and changed.

This new feature does not affect the manual backups, which a system administrator can perform at any time from the Manual Backup Archives menu.

System-wide Notifications to Peer Sites

Advisories can now be used by the system administrators for pushing notifications that are visible not only in the VMware Cloud Director UI but also in the VMware Cloud Director Availability portal. Such notifications are very handy for announcing upcoming maintenance or upgrades, as different priorities can be set and the message itself can contain text and links.

They can be addressed to other system administrators, all tenant organizations and their users, or to specific organizations and their users.

Only system administrators can configure them in the Advisories menu under Administration in the Cloud Director UI. 

Note: When all tenant organizations are chosen, this will show the advisory to all organizations no matter if they use VMware Cloud Director Availability or not.

Replication Policy Updates

Replication policies are essential to system administrators for onboarding tenants and defining service tiers. Through them, they can enforce certain limitations on tenant organizations. One new option that can be found when creating or editing a replication policy is to allow or disallow migrations from the cloud to the on-premises data center. If enabled, this will prevent tenants from migrating any workload that is running in the cloud to their data center.

One new option for facilitating the definition of new policies is the Clone button. Using it, you can instantly create a replica policy with all its settings and adjust only that setting you need instead of configuring everything from scratch.

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 YouTube, especially our Feature Fridays series!