VMware Cloud Director Availability™ provides replications and failover at a vApp or virtual machine level. VMware Cloud Director Availability is a unified solution, that provides on premises to cloud and cloud to cloud onboarding, migration, and disaster recovery for multi-tenant cloud sites.

What is VMware Cloud Director Availability

VMware Cloud Director Availability offers secure migration and disaster recovery capabilities to or between multi-tenant cloud sites. VMware Cloud Director Availability provides simplified onboarding and ensures the continuous availability of VMware vSphere® workloads and automates recovery operations.

VMware Cloud Director Availability provides VMware Cloud Provider partners with a converged way to protect and recover workloads and data and to provide flexible workload migration services to and from on-premises resources and between cloud sites.

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a converged appliance-based solution that provides the following capabilities:
  • Dedicated interfaces for the services deployment and management
  • Native integration with VMware Cloud Director™ by using the VMware Cloud Director plug-in for the replication management
  • Access for tenant and cloud provider users by using the VMware Cloud Director Availability Tenant Portal
  • Access for tenant users by using the VMware Cloud Director Availability vSphere Client Plug-In
  • Tenant self-service protection, failover, and failback operations for each virtual machine or for each vApp
  • Symmetrical replication and recovery flow that can be started from either the source or the recovery site
  • Storage independence from VMware vSphere®

Replication and migration features provided by VMware Cloud Director Availability:

  • Full onboarding and migration capabilities from a single administration interface
  • Automated inventory collection of virtual data centers, unprotected and protected vApps and virtual machines, storage profiles, and network configuration
  • Self-service virtual machine migration from on-premises resources to cloud, cloud to on-premises resources, or cloud to cloud vApp, and virtual machine migrations between VMware Cloud Director instances
  • Managed onboarding and disaster recovery capabilities for on-premises resources to cloud, and cloud to cloud scenarios
  • Automated tenant replication, migration, failover, and failback of vApps and operations after a failover

VMware Cloud Director Availability integration with VMware Cloud Director forms a disaster recovery infrastructure in which the disaster recovery organization controls operate as an activation-controlled policy that provides the disaster recovery capabilities for each tenant. The organization controls include Recovery Point Objective (RPO), snapshots, and number of permitted replications for the tenant disaster recovery.

Service level agreement (SLA) provided by VMware Cloud Director Availability:
  • 5 minutes of minimum RPO
  • The RPO is customizable by the cloud provider
Security features provided by VMware Cloud Director Availability:
  • Encryption of the replication traffic by using end-to-end TLS encryption
  • The TLS session is terminated at each Cloud Replicator Appliance
  • Built-in optional compression of the replication traffic
Day-2 cloud provider operations and monitoring of VMware Cloud Director Availability:
  • Policy-based management of the disaster recovery capabilities
  • Migration of tenants from one VMware Cloud Director instance to another, for example, to set up a new data center
  • Temporary transfer of workloads to another VMware Cloud Director site, for example, to perform maintenance

  • Certificate management and password management in the VMware Cloud Director Availability services and in the disaster recovery infrastructure

Clustering support:
  • Cluster datastore support that allows the storage migration to a cluster datastore
  • Edge clusters support in VMware Cloud Director ensures an optimal performance of the VMware Cloud Director environments

How Does VMware Cloud Director Availability Work

In a cloud environment, Replicator Service, Manager Service, Cloud Service, and Tunnel Service operate together to support the replication management, secure communication, and storage of the replicated data. Cloud providers can support recovery for multiple tenant environments that can scale to handle increasing loads for each tenant and for multiple tenants.

In an on-premises environment, Replicator Service and a preconfigured instance of Tunnel Service support replication management by using both the VMware Cloud Director Availability vSphere Client Plug-In and the VMware Cloud Director Availability Tenant Portal, dedicated to tenants.

For more information, go to the VMware Cloud Director Availability documentation and the VMware Cloud Director Availability product pages.