It’s amazing what can happen in a year! Just a year ago, VMware announced the release of vCloud Director 1.5. Today, VMware announced the vCloud Director 5.1 release, and it’s full of new features!
by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
For starters, just check out some of the increases in the scalability:
Supported in 5.0
Supported in VCD 5.1 (*)
# of VMs
20,000
30,000
# of powered on VMs
10,000
10,000
# VMs per vApp
64
128
# of hosts
2,000
2,000
# of VCs
25
25
# of users
10,000
10,000
# of Orgs
10,000
10,000
Max # vApps per org
500
3,000
# of vDCs
10,000
10,000
# of Datastores
1,024
1,024
# of consoles
300
500
# of vApp Networks
–
1,000
# of External Networks
–
512
# of Isolated vDC Networks
–
2,000
# of Direct vDC Networks
–
10,000
# of Routed vDC Networks
–
2,000
# Network Pools
–
25
# Catalogs
1,000
10,000
(Note: The numbers represented here are ‘soft’ numbers and do not reflect hard limits that can not be exceeded)
You’ll notice that there are some line items here that refer to ‘vDC Networks’. This is a new construct in 5.1, which replaces the organization network concept in previous versions. Organization vDC networks simplify the virtual network topology present in vCloud Director and facilitate more efficient use of resources.
That’s not all the networking changes present though! Major enhancements have been introduced with the Edge Gateway. Some highlights include:
– The ability to have two different deployment models (compact and full) to provide users a choice over resource consumption and performance.
– High availability provided by having a secondary Edge Gateway that can seamlessly take over in the event of a failure of the primary
– Multiple interfaces. In previous versions the vShield Edge device supported 2 interfaces. The Edge Gateways in vCloud Director 5.1 now support 10 interfaces and can be connected to multiple external networks.
The networking services that are provided out of the box with vCloud Director 5.1 have also been enhanced. DHCP can be provided on isolated networks. NAT services now allow for the specification of SNAT and DNAT rules to provide a finer degree of control. There’s also support for a virtual load balancer that can direct network traffic to a pool of servers using one of several algorithms.
Additionally, vCloud Director 5.1 introduces support for VXLAN. This provides ‘virtual wires’ that the cloud administrator can use to define thousands of networks that can be consumed on demand.
Providing the ability to have a L2 domain with VXLAN that encompasses multiple clusters gives rise to the need to support the use of multiple clusters within a Provider VDC. This is part of the Elastic VDC feature that has now been extended to support the Allocation Pool resource model, along with the Pay-As-You-Go model.
Support for Storage Profiles provides the ability for cloud administrators to quickly provide multiple tiers of storage to the organizations. Previously, to do this, one had to define multiple Provider VDCs. For those who have done this, a feature has also been added to allow for the merger of multiple Provider VDCs into a single object.
Numerous changes were also added to increase the usability. Top on this list is the support for snapshots! The UI has also been updated to make it a easier for the end user to create new vApps, reset leases, and find items within the catalog. Support for tagging objects with metadata information is also provided through the UI as well.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this represents a lot of features… And I haven’t even gotten into the API extensibility features or the support for Single Sign-On (SSO)! For now, if you want more information, I’d suggest reading the What’s New whitepaper here:
