VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 is Generally Available now. Together with the newly branded logo, it brings a significant amount of new features and improvements for our VMware Cloud Providers to deliver even better DR and migration services to their tenants and offer an answer to combat Ransomware.
New features available:
- Advanced Retention Rules – Now providers can set more than one rule for retention of the instances. Up to five different retention rules can store instances with a granularity that is changing over time.
- DR and Migration Plans – Orchestrate and schedule the recovery and the migration operations across multiple virtual machines and vApps by using plans with sequences of delayable and pausable steps, containing execution settings and existing virtual machines and vApps replications references.
- 1-Minute Target Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – Now you can set the shortest RPO as 1 minute, by using the slider for RPO in Configure replication, in SLA profiles, or in replication policies. To meet shorter RPO, verify that you follow the recommendations for lowering the RPO violations occurrence and see https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director-Availability/index.html. An I/O intensive workload protected with shorter RPO can cause RPO violations.
- Multisite Cloud to Cloud authentication – When multiple Availability cloud sites use a single VMware Cloud Director instance now you can use multisite authentication for performing regular replication operations when prompted to extend the session from Availability site A to Availability site B.
- On-Premises Authentication by Using a Token – With vCenter Server 7.0 or later, a new authentication mechanism for the on-premises tenants allows performing disaster recovery operations in the vSphere Client Plug-In that require authentication to the cloud site. When the organization uses an external identity provider, for example, SAML, the on-premises tenants can now use that method for authentication.
- Add Virtual Machines in Existing vApp Groups – Now, you can group one or several new virtual machines to an already existing vApp replication from on-premises to the cloud.
- Placement Policies – Now the system providers and their tenants can select a placement organization VDC compute policy for a specific cluster or host for the recovered virtual machine.
- Optimized Reverse – When performing a reverse task, now skips performing a full synchronization back to the original source workload by transferring only the deltas when there are no blocks changed in the original source and the original source disks are not modified in any way.
- Backup and Restore – Now you can perform an in-place restore on existing appliances. Also, now you can perform a restore on a single cloud appliance.
- Select Endpoint Address for Each Network Adapter – Now in a Cloud Replicator Appliance or in a Cloud Tunnel Appliance with multiple network interfaces, you can specify which of the network adapters to use for local site communication.
- Replacing the Cloud Service Certificate Without Impacting Paired On-Premises – Now the paired on-premises appliances verify the entire SSL certificate chain of the Cloud Service. As a result, when replacing the certificate with a valid CA-signed certificate, the paired on-premises appliances do not need re-pairing with the cloud site.
- Tunnel Connectivity – The following new sections now are available for verifying the statuses of the connections from the local Tunnel Service to the following destinations: Local components connectivity to all the remaining services on the cloud appliances in the local cloud site; Remote cloud sites connectivity to the remote Tunnel Service instances in all paired remote cloud sites with the local cloud site; On-Prem Incoming connectivity to all paired on-premises appliances with the local cloud site.
- Improved Replicating Workloads – Now on start virtual machine replication when VMware Cloud Director Availability encounters a virtual machine that is already configured for replication, possibly by another replication solution, the stale replication is automatically unconfigured first and then it is configured for replication.