What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 10.0? (2/2)

Continuation of What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 10.0?

For my final topics on vCD 10.0, let’s review the following:

1. vCloud Director Appliance Updates and Migration Path
2. Placement and Sizing Policies
3. Backup Ecosystem Certification
4. Miscellaneous

vCloud Director Appliance Updates and Migration Path

Let’s spend some time to discuss the state of the vCD appliance and upgrade/migration path. The appliance framework continues to evolve for new and existing providers that utilize vCD. In vCD 10.0, the appliance development is focusing on migration and upgrade scenarios while rectifying previous security patches.

1. Ability to seamlessly upgrade to vCD 10.0 Appliance – for any existing 9.7 appliance consumers, this will upgrade the cell state and PostgreSQL (PgSQL) instance.
2. Upgrade/Migrate to a 9.7 or 10 Appliance state. This will be supported for current vCD instances that are running SQL Server or External PgSQL.
   1. However, do note that vCD 10.0 does not support SQL Server. The only database option for vCD 10.0 and future releases will be PostgreSQL.

Depending on your current state, there will be a single step or multiple steps involved. I am working on a MindMap that reviews each of these permutations. This will be verified and published over the next few weeks. See below for what I’m trying to accomplish:

I will have more on this in the near future. I realize this could be a little complex, so trying to see how we can provide a clear path of progression.

Placement and Sizing Policies

Next up, let’s discuss placement and sizing policies which is a fairly new concept but greatly enhanced in vCD 10.0.

With vCD 9.7, compute polices introduces the ability to provide granular performance and resource allocation control. In 10.0, this is broken out into two components: VM Placement Policy and VM Sizing Policy. Therefore, a provider and tenant can place intuitive controls from the user interface.

VM Placement Policy

First of all, the VM Placement Policy allows a provider to create a group of hosts that are named/tagged within a provider VDC (pVDC). In essence, we are sub-allocating a set of hosts within the pVDC cluster(s) that could be selected based on specific criteria, such as:

1. Performance
2. Resource Requirements
3. Licensing
4. Tenant Allocation

To start, placement policies are configured inside of the pVDC and then published to an oVDC.

While this is a nice addition, it is optional and a provider can continue to use the default policy that’s created at installation. Note that only one policy can be assigned to a VM.

Overall, this is a great addition as it allows providers and tenants to discretely control placement based on scenario-based requirements.

VM Sizing Policy

A Sizing Policy is another granular mechanism that allows the provider to assign a consumption framework on a per-VM/vApp basis.

Previously, we controlled this through the orgVDC object – apply limits, reserved capacity, and so forth.

With the introduction of the new FlexVDC allocation model, we now have per-workload granular control.

As one can see, we can control the constraint of resources on a count, speed, reservation, limit, or share perspective.

Just like the placement policy, the provider can create a VM Sizing Policy and expose this to the organization as an available object.

In my opinion, VM Sizing Policies will typically be used with FlexVDC allocation models. They do work with legacy allocation models (PAYGO, Reservation, Allocation). However, anything configured in the sizing policy that directly conflicts with the allocation model will result in a warning along a request to convert to FlexVDC:

By default, a provider does not need to create a sizing or placement policy out of the gate. We can easily introduce this on a per-organization basis. For VM Sizing, we can see this as a new selection on the left side:

From the selected oVDC, we can then expose it as an available VM Sizing Policy along with setting it as the default –

Overall, there are many possibilities with placement and sizing for tenants. I look forward to recommending this for many of my providers.

Backup Ecosystem Certification

It’s been great to see our ecosystem partners truly invest into vCD. With vCD 10.0, we have Cohesity, Commvault, Dell/EMC, Rubrik, and Veeam as trusted partners that have built (or in the process of building) intuitive integration into vCD.

Personally, I love seeing this because it truly shows the value of vCD’s open platform. At the end of the day, this partnership shows we are committed to a great customer experience.

As a reminder, a provider can publish plugins through the vCD UI –

From the Customize Portal option, I can add and expose specific services that tenants can consume natively inside of vCD.

Miscellaneous

As you can see, this is a jam-packed release and I couldn’t cover everything in exhaustive detail. I’d like to point a few other items that are pertinent to the vCD 10.0 (or been recently discussed).

Terraform Provider 2.4

Terraform released their newest version (2.4) that was posted on GitHub:

https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-vcd/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Object Storage Services with Cloudian

This is an exciting addition that natively provides object level storage inside of vCD. Honestly, Tomas Fojta did an incredible job on his writeup that goes into the inner-working of this solution with Cloudian.

It’s great to see this level of capability on a per-tenant basis. Read more about Cloudian here.

Native PKS Support

While Container Services Extension (CSE) has been around for some time, 2.0 was recently introduced and provides brokering of Pivotal Container Services (PKS).

My esteemed peer, Joe Mann, in the VMware Cloud Provider Architecture team has created a very nice visualization of how the CSE extension works with vCD.

More about CSE here along with the download bits.

Bitnami

With bringing Bitnami into the VMware family, this is going to be an integration point with vCD 10.0 in the near future. As of today, a provider can subscribe to Bitnami and import images into the native vCD catalog.

While this is going an ongoing evolution, the conceptual goal is to provide an application marketplace that can integrate directly into vCloud Director.

I have not been able to test this directly yet, but I am looking forward to evaluating this further.

Conclusion

What a release! For me, it’s still unreal to see the level of commitment and dedication from the VMware Cloud Provider Business Unit to bring a solution to market. I’ve been able to collaborate with some of the smartest people in this industry.

However, this isn’t just us developing something in a bubble (fenced vApp?). There is a distinct partnership between our cloud providers and customers (you!) that help us drive vCloud Director forward. Some of you might even recognize these additions.

I am grateful and fortunate to be along for the ride. See you at VMworld!

-Daniel