VMware vCloud Availability Logical Architecture

Originally posted on DavidHill.co

VMware recently launched a new version of VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, with the latest version being 1.0.1.

I wanted to talk about the VMware vCloud Availability Logical Architecture, and how a public cloud consumer using a vCloud Availability offering from a vCloud Air Network provider can easily build a Disaster Recovery offering.

Let’s first quickly look at what it is:

The vCloud Availability offering is a warm stand-by capacity failover solution that is easy to deploy and uses the VMware vSphere Replication appliance (VSRA). This is a single appliance deployed into your on-premises vSphere environment and leverages vSphere Replication to replicate and migrate you’re on-prem virtual machines to the cloud.

VSRA is a secure end to end replication technology, encrypting the virtual machines the moment it leaves the ESXi host, until it is stored on the provider side environment.

Logical Architecture

So how does it work?

The VSRA contains a number of components. Specifically it has a component called the vCloud Tunneling Agent (vCTA). This creates a secure SSL connection between the on-prem VSRA, and the Cloud Proxy cell running in a vCAN provider cloud. When a vCAN provider builds a vCloud Availability offering, they specifically have two components in vCloud Director. These are the Cloud Proxy Cells, and the Hybrid DR API. Once a consumer configures the VSRA to point to the provider, the vCTA creates a secure tunnel between them over the internet. This ensures that all the replication traffic end-to-end is encrypted and secure.

Once the tunnel is in place, the VRSA communicates with the vSphere Replication Cloud Service (vRCS) which informs vCloud Director of the VM placement and configuration items. The VSRA then replicates the virtual machine in excatly the same way if you were doing vCenter to vCenter replication.

Deployment

It’s pretty straight forward to deploy on-prem, you can watch these videos (produced for vCloud Air) that show you how to deploy, and replicate using the vSphere Replication Appliance (VSRA).