VMware vCloud Director 9.5: The best of VMware in the Cloud

We are excited to announce that VMware’s flagship Cloud Management Platform for Cloud Providers, vCloud Director, received a major upgrade to help both Cloud Providers and their enterprise customers. The new vCloud Director 9.5 enhances easy and intuitive cloud provisioning and consumption by adding highly-requested capabilities including self-service data protection, disaster recovery, and container-orchestration for cloud consumers, along with multi-site management, multi-tenancy and cross-platform networking for Cloud Providers. With its new features, vCloud Director is helping Cloud Providers further differentiate their cloud services built on VMware cloud infrastructure and provide enterprises a best-in-class, self-service, VMware-powered cloud.

6 Key New Innovations in vCloud Director 9.5

vCloud Director 9.5 builds on its previous updates by introducing several key innovations:

• Cross-site networking improvements powered by deeper integration with NSX
• Initial integration with NSX-T
• Full transition to an HTML5 UI for the cloud consumer
• Improvements to role-based access control
• Natively integrated data protection capabilities, powered by Dell-EMC Avamar
• vCD virtual appliance deployment model

Deeper Integration with NSX

vCloud Director 9.5 enables Cloud Providers to deliver seamless hybridity and security across sites and datacenters with cross-VDC Layer-2 networking. The update delivers greater network control through deeper integration with NSX featuring Universal Transport Zone, Universal Logical Switch, Universal Logical Router, and Local Egress, enabling pre-configuration of datacenter connections and eliminating previously-manual IPAM and config settings. Enterprises and Cloud Providers are now able to stretch networks across their virtual datacenters on different vCenters or vCloud Director instances residing at different sites right from the UI.

Cross-Platform Networking with NSX-T

Initial integration with NSX-T delivers key improvements that accelerate the performance and predictability of applications, especially NFV workloads, with higher throughput and lower latency. The NSX-T support provides the ability to accommodate NSX-T and NSX-V managers in the same vCD instance, the ability to spin up isolated logical L2 networks with a direct connected network (powered by the NSX-T logical switch), and allows Cloud Providers to provision virtual datacenters having host-clusters with and without VMware’s Enhanced Networking Stack.

Intuitive Management with new HTML5 Interface

vCloud Director 9.5 transforms the cloud consumer (or ‘tenant’) user experience with a full transition to an HTML5 UI (from Flex), including brand-new portlets for multi-site datacenter management, user management, and access control. For the customer, the enhanced UI delivers a more intuitive experience that reduces management time and simplifies monitoring, leading to greater customer satisfaction, engagement and retention. For the Cloud Provider, the UI provides intuitive, single pane of glass visualization of entire cloud environments. For the Cloud Provider, the UI provides intuitive, single pane of glass visualization of entire cloud environments.

Redesigned Role-Based Access Control

With a completely redesigned Role-Based Access Control framework, vCloud Director 9.5 helps Cloud Providers and cloud consumers reduce administrative work and the frequent IT support requirements, maximizing operational efficiency, easing role governance, and improving compliance. The new RBAC framework provides a rights-model that is real-world, granular, and easily re-configurable.

Self-Service Data Protection with Dell EMC Avamar

We’re really excited to also announce the integration of the Dell EMC Avamar Data Protection engine with vCloud Director, providing simple, self-service data protection capabilities right from the vCloud Director UI. Avamar delivers a high performance, scale-out architecture with low operating costs. It also now offers industry-leading de-duplication for multi-tenant, distributed cloud environments.

The Avamar integration demonstrates the tremendous value our partners can add using the extensibility toolset that vCloud Director offers today. vCloud Director represents the fastest, easiest path to differentiation, service monetization and revenue realization for Cloud Providers.

Simplify Cloud Modernization with vCloud Director 9.5

vCloud Director allows seamless provisioning and consumption of VMware resources in a cloud model. It offers all capabilities of the VMware SDDC, along with cloud-specific features such as multi-tenancy, elasticity, self- service, platform extensibility and containers—all in an intuitive, modern user interface. Jon Waite, Chief Technology Officer at Computer Concepts Ltd , one of our beta partners, said “The new release of VMware vCloud Director v9.5 provides significantly enhanced functionality in the new HTML5 User Interface which now allows almost all operations to be completed across multiple Datacenter locations. Integration of extensions such as vRealize Operations for cloud tenants is seamless and works very well. CCL have been extremely impressed with VMware’s focus and developments in vCD and look forward to being able to share this release with our cloud tenants.”

Cloud Providers use vCloud Director to stand up differentiated and value-added offerings, making them the most capable candidates to host vSphere-based workloads in the Cloud. For the Enterprise, vCloud Director delivers the best VMware in the Cloud experience from one of 4,000+ VMware Cloud Providers spread across 100+ countries.

Check out all-new resources: FAQs, datasheets, Partner Testimonials and more, here: https://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director.html

For more information on VMware’s solutions for Cloud Providers, please visit: http://vcpp.cloud/

To find a VMware Cloud Provider that offers vCD-based services, please visit: https://www.cloud.vmware.com/providers

Author – Ari Paul