VMware vCloud Availability for Cloud to Cloud 1.5 is announced! What’s New?

I am excited to announce that vCloud Availability for Cloud to Cloud 1.5 (vCAv-C2C) will be released for VMware Cloud Providers at end of September. This has been a long and fruitful journey between strategic design partners and our internal teams.

In this post, I will review what’s new inside of vCloud Availability for Cloud to Cloud 1.5.

Don’t know what vCloud Availability for Cloud to Cloud is – don’t worry, check out this intro post!

To start, our lightboard video as an intro to C2C and what’s new with 1.5 –

A quick summary of what I’ll be discussing:

1. 1. Enterprise Scale
   2. Service Provider Policies for Offer Management
   3. Seamless and unified experience with integration to vCloud Director
   4. vRealize Orchestrator Integration (Compatible with C2C 1.0)
   5. vRealize Operations Day 2 Monitoring Pack (Compatible with C2C 1.0)
   6. Public API
   7. Enhanced Usage Reporting

Scale

Let’s talk about scalability for C2C for a moment. The BU has certified the following for C2C 1.5 –

• 110 concurrent failover protections
• Over 3,000 active protections across 100 tenants. This is a variable number as it will depend on the number of active tenants along with protected operations. However, in discussing this with Engineering, we’ve seen 4,000 VM’s protected by vCAv-C2C.
• Scale up to 7 tested replication instances.

Again, this has been an important enhancement as we have received multiple requests regarding scale. I would also say this is the maximum configuration we’ve tested so far. This does not mean our technology is limited to these numbers. If there’s something specific you’d like to see, please talk to your VMware Cloud Provider field team.

Policies

With C2C 1.5, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) can now manage access control for vCloud Availability – Cloud to Cloud DR on per tenant organization basis. By default, all tenant organizations are disabled and CSPs can choose to enable C2C DR service for one or many organizations. This allows CSPs to deliver Cloud to Cloud DR as a value-added service to their tenants.

As we can see from above, I have the Default Policy along with “Org1 Policy” that I created that I applied to my Org1 organization.

So, if an org that has not been whitelisted for Cloud to Cloud usage, what do they see? Well, they would get an error when attempting outgoing or incoming replications such as the below:

In addition to white-listing organizations, C2C DR also allows a CSP to create and assign new policies for select organization, thus giving them an opportunity for tiered offering and providing them better control on their capacity management. Following new policies have been added:

1. Limit the maximum number of outgoing and/or incoming replications per organization
2. Limited maximum number of replicated VM’s per organization
3. Limited maximum number snapshots created by VM
4. Allow to set lower limit on RPO per organization

Again, providing a granular application to specific orgs. We could create multiple policies and have different policies associated with each of them.

Last of all, we can see the compliance state on each org –

Integrated vCD UI

While using the vCloud Director portal extensibility capability, the team has now introduced an integrated C2C plugin for vCD!

Once C2C is deployed and registered to your vCD instance, we will see the Availability link in the context switching menu (or what we like to call the hamburger menu).

From there, the tenant user can navigate to C2C from the vCD interface, thus providing fully integrated and seamless experience and alleviating need of any console hopping.

vRealize Orchestrator Integration

While this is something that will be released post version 1.5, this is an awesome addition as now we can provide unique workflows on a per tenant/use-case basis in an automated fashion. Now, combine this with the power of the new vRO/vCD integration within the Content Library!

From vRO, we can see we have a new section vCloud Availability –

The first thing we would need to do is connect to each respective site –

From here, we have multiple options available that were built by our team, including IP address change after failover:

vRealize Operations Day 2 Monitoring Pack

We are now introducing a management pack for vRealize Operations. This will be also released post version 1.5, however, this will allow the Provider team to have a single monitoring and analytics tool for providing vCAv-C2C statistics and rollups of the environment.

There a few out of the box dashboards available –

From here, we can get a picture of what’s going on from an operational perspective, including any RPO violations set by vCAv policies. While my test environment is clean, this gives you an idea of what to expect.

As a last note – vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Operations plug-in have their own release cycles and would typically lag a little bit behind the core Cloud to Cloud releases. The vRO and vROPs plug-ins for Cloud to Cloud are currently supported only for C2C 1.0 release). Please reach out to your VMware Cloud Provider field team if you’d like to discuss these further.

Public API

There is now an API available for C2C operations. Public API are generated through Swagger which is quickly becoming a de-facto standard for generating APIs. This allows for additional extensibility to Providers on managing C2C operations along with potential opportunity to integrate their Cloud to Cloud DR use-cases into their own Cloud management portal if this wish to do so.

Start off by going to the API documentation here –

The steps to set up the Swagger client is fairly easy. I was able to do this in a Windows environment by using the PowerShell commands.

Start with downloading the JSON file –

Then, download the swagger-codegen client and run the generate command to generate the Java client –

And now the build is ready for .java files with the C2C parameters. I hope to have time to play around with this further.

Enhanced Usage Reporting

While Usage Meter integration is underway, we can pull reports from the C2C appliances by logging into the application console – documentation is here. 

We start by SSH’ing or opening the console to the C2C appliance. From there, we need to authenticate again in the h4 context so we can type in the ‘usage-report’ command –

Now, I am able to run ‘usage-report’ and find out my usage –

Again, a lot of great content and additions to C2C 1.5. Please check it out!

-Daniel