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

What is VMware Cloud Director Availability

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

VMware Cloud Director Availability gives the Partner Connect Program providers a converged way to protect and recover their tenants workloads and data and provides flexible workload migration to and from on-premises tenants resources and between provider cloud sites.

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a converged appliance-based solution that provides the following capabilities:
  • Dedicated interfaces for the services deployment and for their management.
  • For Cloud Director sites, VMware Cloud Director Availability integrates natively with VMware Cloud Director by using the VMware Cloud Director plug-in.
  • Access for on-premises tenants by using the VMware Cloud Director Availability vSphere Client Plug-In
  • Storage independence from vSphere.

Replication and migration features provided by VMware Cloud Director Availability:

  • Full onboarding and migration capabilities from a single management interface.
  • Tenant self-service protection, failover, and failback operations for each virtual machine or for each vApp.
  • 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 sites.
  • Symmetrical replication and recovery flow that can be started from either the source or the recovery site.
  • Automated inventory collection of virtual data centers, unprotected and protected vApps and virtual machines, storage profiles, and network configuration.
  • 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.

When VMware Cloud Director Availability integrates with VMware Cloud Director, it forms a disaster recovery infrastructure where the 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 for replications with sites backed by VMware Cloud Director:
  • 1 minute 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 Replicator Appliance.
  • Built-in optional compression of the replication traffic.
Day-2 operations and monitoring of VMware Cloud Director Availability:
  • Policy-based management of the disaster recovery capabilities.
  • Migration of tenants workloads 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.

  • Certificates and passwords management for the VMware Cloud Director Availability services and for the disaster recovery infrastructure.

How Does VMware Cloud Director Availability Work

  • In a cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director, one or multiple Replicator Service instances, a Manager Service, a Cloud Service, and one or, optionally for high availability - two Tunnel Service instances all operate together to support the replication management, secure communication, and storage of the replicated data. The providers can support recovery for multiple tenant environments that can scale to handle increasing loads for each tenant and for multiple tenants.
  • In a cloud vCenter Server site, a Replicator Service, a Manager Service, and a Tunnel Service all operate in a vCenter Replication Management Appliance. Additional Replicator Appliance instances can support performance scaling of the cloud site.
  • In an on-premises site, a Replicator Service and a preconfigured Tunnel Service operate in either of the appliances, depending on the remote cloud site:
    • an On-Premises to Cloud Director Replication Appliance paired with a cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director, or in
    • an On-Premises to Cloud vCenter Replication Appliance paired with a cloud vCenter Server site.
    The on-premises appliances supports 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.