VMware Cloud Provider Archives - Page 2 of 11

What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 10.0? (1/2)

With much excitement, VMware is announcing vCloud Director (vCD) 10.0 during VMworld US. This continues to provide significant value to our VMware Cloud Providers and tenants that consume vCD for services.

vCD 10.0 continues to demonstrate and focus on the following objectives:

A Service Delivery Platform – rapidly deploy and integrate services into a multi-tenant, scalable platform with ecosystem partnership.
Multi-Workload and Extensible Capabilities – it’s not about traditional VM’s anymore. Distinct additions like native PKS integration or next-generation virtual network services are integrated out of the box.
Intuitive User Experience – while technology can be difficult sometimes, vCD orchestrates and automates many of the backend infrastructure tasks to get services operationalized. With the new H5 interface, this is very evident.

I’m going to summarize a few items that are pertinent to this release. However, this is not this is a comprehensive list by any means. The goal of this post is to provide an overview of why each of these additions/updates matter to our service providers and consumers.

Disclaimer: while vCD 10.0 is announced as of today, features might change based on the general availability (GA) date. I’ve been working with a release candidate build for my review. Therefore, this is subject to change.

HTML5 User Interface Transition
NSX-T Support
Central Point of Management Additions

In Part 2, I will cover:

vCD Appliance Updates and Migration Path
Placement and Sizing Policies
Backup Ecosystem Certification
Miscellaneous

Hang tight, there’s a lot of information here.

VMworld 2019 – Checklist for VMware Cloud Providers

As we are approaching VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, I wanted to spend some time on what sessions and labs to review when attending VMworld.

The VMware Cloud Provider Program continues to grow exponentially and this year we have over 30 VMworld sessions that are focused on our VMware Cloud Providers. This is extremely exciting as we continue to see more of an emphasis on our great service providers and ensuring all VMware customers are aware of these strategic partnerships.

With that said, I’d like to highlight a few sessions that I believe will be important to watch live or catch the recording at a later time.

First off, our VCPP VMworld catalog is located here: https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld19us/us19catalog?search.products=15615668180870019stm

Utilizing Central Point of Management (CPoM) in VMware vCloud Director 9.7

One of the extremely exciting additions to VMware vCloud Director (vCD) is the ability to present vCenter instances securely to tenant organizations utilizing the vCD user interface – this is referred to as Central Point of Management, or what we abbreviate to as CPoM. Tom Fojta did a great job highlighting what’s new inside of vCD 9.7 here.

In this post, I am going to review the steps required to successfully deploy your first vCenter-SDDC to an organization inside of vCloud Director 9.7. You will need to utilize the CloudAPI, but do not be alarmed, I will walk you through these steps.

How does VMware vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud 1.5 interoperate with vCD Cross-VDC Networking?

I get this question quite a bit due to the new vCloud Director 9.5 Cross-VDC networking functionality – does vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud 1.5 (C2C) work with stretched networking inside of Cross-VDC networking?

The answer is: yes!

This is another great addition for recoverability considerations as one could fail over between vCloud Director instances without modifying the guest OS IP address. Furthermore, based on the application architecture, one could have active-active applications and ensure replication/failover in the event of a disaster.

Let’s go through my example high-level design I’ve worked up in my lab –

Example Cross-VDC setup with vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud 1.5

In the above diagram, we can see I have two active vCloud Director instances, Site-A and Site-B. I have two organizations, “Daniel” that resides in Site-A along with “Daniel-B” that resides in Site-B.

C2C is deployed on each site in the combined model and I have multi-site pairing completed so I can easily manage this between my two sites –

Within my Cross-VDC networking setup, I currently have my active egress setup to Site-A as depicted in the diagram above.

Last of all, I ran a protected workflow from Site-A to Site-B for my Stretched-vApp-VM –

From there, one can either migrate or failover the workload and without any guest OS IP changes. I am going to do a video shortly, but here’s a short GIF I created that shows the ease of use of failing over between my Site-A and Site-B –

via GIPHY

After failover, I can then access Stretched-vApp-VM from the new NAT address on Site-B.

An Organization Administrator could also configure active/active or active/passive egress points for additional resiliency. This provides further capability inside of vCloud Director, especially with stretched networking and a complementary availability solution.

Thanks!

-Daniel