Cloud

Hi everyone!  Here are some of the news from VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5:

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5 now supports the following new functionality, depending on the deployment type:

Enhancements in DR and migration to vSphere

  • Enhancements in DR and migration to vSphere: now the on-premises appliance no longer requires public URL and supports a single-step pairing to the provider site. The pairing from on-premises to a provider no longer requires additional steps for confirming the pairing from the provider site. However, the pairing between two provider sites remains a two-step process, initiated from one provider site, then completed from the other provider site.
  • Add Replicator appliances in the provider site: in the provider-hosted vCenter Server instance, after configuring the vCenter Replication Management Appliance, you can now add one or more Replicator Appliance instances. That scales the performance when replicating tenant vSphere workloads between an on-premises vCenter Server instance and a provider-hosted vCenter Server instance or between provider-hosted vCenter Server instances. Adding Replicator Appliance instances is also supported for existing environments.
  • Recovery settings for vSphere DR and migration: now you can preconfigure the destination virtual machines location and compute resource and the network mapping that apply when recovering the workload in the destination site.
  • View-only vSphere user: VMware Cloud Director Availability now supports read-only users and allows users to only monitor replications or administrators to only monitor the system health and the replications.
  • Replicate encrypted virtual machines: VMware Cloud Director Availability now supports replicating virtual machines with an encryption-enabled storage policy, providing end-to-end encryption also in the case for vSphere DR and migration. 

Enhancements in Cloud Director sites

  • Extended control and management of replication policies: cloud to on-premises migrations can now be disallowed separately from cloud to cloud migrations. Once the cloud site is upgraded to version 4.5, disallowing migrations to on-premises stops all outgoing migrations to all on-premises appliances in the organization, regardless of their VMware Cloud Director Availability versions.
  • System-wide notifications to peer sites: these advisories notifications can now appear on the top of the VMware Cloud Director Availability pages after creating them in VMware Cloud Director. You can select a priority and duration for showing the message and its audience: to the administrator users, to users within a specific organization, or to the users in all organizations.
  • VM sizing policy selection: when creating or modifying a replication you can now also select a VM sizing policy in addition to the VM placement policy. Within an organization, the VDC compute policies control the compute resources allocation for the recovered workload to several predefined sizes.
  • View-only system user: VMware Cloud Director Availability now supports read-only users and allows users that are not an Organization administrator to manage replications.
  • Advanced recovery settings: you can modify the destination network settings, the guest customization, and the guest customization script that are applied when recovering the workload in the destination site.
  • Clone a replication policy: now you can duplicate each selected replication policy by clicking the Clone button.

Enhancements in all sites

  • Backup and restore automation: you can now schedule the creation and the upload of the VMware Cloud Director Availability appliance backup files to an external server using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
  • Service and appliance uptime: you can now check the uptime of both the services and the appliance on the System Health page.
  • Recent Tasks: now, by expanding this global taskbar on the bottom of the page in the appliances interface, you can see both system and replication tasks that recently executed. To filter these tasks by exit criteria, click Running, Failed, or Succeeded.

Upgrade

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5 supports an in-place upgrade directly from versions 4.3.x and 4.4.x.

For information about the upgrade process, see Upgrading in the Cloud Director Site and Upgrading On-premises and Provider Site.

Documentation

Closing Notes
I hope it has been useful. For more information about the new and updated features of this release, see What’s New in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5.  See you next!

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