This post originally appeared in Nebulae Magazine by Fernando Escobar.
Recently, VMware released its latest release of vCloud Director version 9.0, which is available today for installation at the Cloud Provider level. This launch is accompanied by several technical level elements that compose differentiating factors, allowing you to strengthen your value proposition under the VMware Cloud Provider Program Portfolio, featuring:
1 – Integration of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with the native Disaster Recovery as a Service solution (DRaaS), including all of the life cycle operations of the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) at corporate level, under a network-level virtualized environment, consumed and maintained through the same self-service IaaS/DRaaS portal.
2 – Implementation of Hybrid Cloud, supporting the managed overflow of the Customer’s private Data Center (on-prem) to the Virtual Data Center at the Cloud Provider side, for purposes of extending networks between sites (stretched LAN-LAN) in addition to the safe migration of workloads to the Cloud.
3-Deployment of the Private Cloud and Automation as a Service, allowing the provisioning of workloads while using custom credentials to the mega Clouds (Amazon AWS, Azure, Google GCP, IBM Bluemix/Softlayer) and backend connections to heterogeneous Hypervisors (KVM, Hyper-V, Xen) and multiple CMP (Openstack, PowerVM) in addition to connections to the local on-prem vCenter environments, as well as connecting to your own space in the Virtual Data Center at the Cloud Provider side (vCloud Director’s Organization VDC).
4- Enhanced support for geographically dispersed IaaS Architecture, including support to multiple sites and geographical areas, under the same IaaS portal.
5- Enhancement of Platform Extensibility at the API level: Allowing integration with Automation and DevOps tools, at both IaaS/DRaaS Portal and NSX level, as well as supporting third-party ecosystem in the market, including but not limited to Billing and Monitoring systems; thus expanding the monetization of the Cloud Provider environment.
6- Exposure of the Graphical GUI / UX interface at the tenant level using HTML5 , allowing the generation of new plugins to facilitate its integration to the partner ecosystem in the market by supporting the VMware stack (vSphere, vSAN, NSX) as well as supporting established management tools integrated directly into vCloud Director (i.e. vRealize product suite).
7- Integration with Application Modernization paradigms such as Cloud Native Applications (CNA) and Container Orchestration (support to Google K8s via upcoming Pivotal Kubernetes Service PKS).
In summary, vCloud Director 9.0 brings even greater monetization opportunities to the Cloud Provider, by combining multiple use cases into the same platform framework, simplifying the offering and facilitating the proper differentiation in the market (see the Poster below, with updated information about VMware Cloud Provider Program‘s Portfolio and Platforms being supported).
