This Changelog is updated with each release of the product or when necessary.

These tables provide the update history of VMware Cloud Director Availability for each version.

4.7

Table 1. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.2 | Build 24058656 (Product version:4.7.2.10056114-4ada44c9c3)
Release Description
04 JUL 2024 VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.2 can now protect and migrate virtual machines with enabled vTPM, and with full, partial, or no encryption of the attached storage disks.
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.2 can encrypt non-encrypted VMs as a part of the protection and migration processes. For more information, see Create a replication for encrypted virtual machines.
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.2 supports protection and migration processes with storage policies that use mixed encryption capabilities.
Table 2. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.1 | Build 23265673 (Product version: 4.7.1.8968498-0422b55a9e)
Release Description
15 FEB 2024 VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.1 includes important resolved issues and updates of third-party libraries that provide security fixes.
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7.1 can now perform cold migrate for workloads to transfer from non-VMware environments, such as KVM, Hyper-V, physical hosts, and others, to a Cloud Director site. The cold migration means that the source machine is powered-off and rebooted into an ISO image, created by VMware Cloud Director Availability. Once booted from this ISO image, a new migration appears on the destination site. For more information, see the VMware Cloud Director Availability cold migration document.
Table 3. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7 | Build 22817906 (Product version: 4.7.0.8400987-96215f032c)
Release Description
23 NOV 2023 Storage policy reassignment during workload recovery - you can activate Change storage placement, then select a different datastore than the selected one in the existing replication, resulting in move of the data after the performed failover or migrate operation completes. All the disks and the vmdk files move to the newly selected storage. For example, the tenants can initially send the replica files to a cheaper and slower storage, where the vmdk gets constructed, then once failed over, the workload moves to expensive and fast storage. For information about changing the storage placement during recovery, see Migrate and Failover.
Security tags - the NSX security tags can be replicated between cloud sites, both running VMware Cloud Director 10.3 and later and VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7. The security tags apply during the recovery of virtual machine, vApp, and vApp template replications. For information about copying the security tags to the destination, see Migrate, Failover, and Test Failover.
VDC VM policies pre-selected - when creating a replication to a Cloud Director site as a destination, when a VM placement or a VM sizing policy with the same name already applies on the source workload, the matching VDC policy becomes pre-selected, allowing to finish the new replication wizard quicker. For information about using the selected VDC policies in the new replication wizard, see Create a protection and Create a migration.
Recovery plans health validation - after creating a recovery plan, on the Health tab you see a validation of the infrastructure and the data for the replications in the plan to check whether the plan execution might fail on some steps. The validation can show a warning when the observed issues cannot prevent the recovery process, or an error when the issues prevent the recovery process, for example, when the destination storage policy is disabled. For information about the health validations, see Recovery plans.
Flexible storage profile assignment - allows replicating one virtual machine to multiple datastores. For example, place one of its disks on a separate datastore, or split some disks from the .vmx file. For information about activating Advanced Datastore Settings and how to use flexible storage profile assignment in the New Replication wizard, see Create a protection and Create a migration.
Pairing sites filtering - the providers can hide some peer sites for certain organizations to prevent every tenant from seeing all paired sites for convenience. The restricted tenants can continue to manage existing incoming replications, but not start new ones as the source site is not visible and cannot see the outgoing replications as they are filtered by site. For information about filtering the peer sites, see Control the paired sites organization access.
Cloud Director authentication model compliance - prepares VMware Cloud Director Availability for the future deprecation of local users in VMware Cloud Director. For information about this depreciation, see VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 Release Notes. API token pairing - also supports pairing an on-premises site to a Cloud Director site by using a one-time access token, see Generate an API access token from VMware Cloud Director. Next, for information about using such API token for the initial pairing, see Configure the On-Premises to Cloud Director Appliance. For information about the updated authentication to remote Cloud Director sites, see Authenticating to paired remote Cloud Director sites. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.7 continues to fully-support local users while they are under deprecation.
Replication tracking virtual machine (RT VM) placement solution for Cloud Director replications - now replaces the independent disk and represents a shadow VM for replication placement to allow per-disk placement. The providers can also configure replication tracking for the existing vApp and VM replications. With a supported version of VMware Cloud Director in the destination site, RT VM replaces the independent disk as placement and reporting solution and allows per-disk storage profiles. For more information about RT VM, see Replication tracking placement solution.
Seed for vSphere DR and migration - using a seed virtual machine is also available for replications between vCenter sites. For information about using a seed, see Configure a replication with a seed.
Deactivate protections to on-premises - protections allow for finer control on the allowed destination site, separating on-premises from cloud sites, similarly to controlling migrations separately for on-premises and cloud destinations. For information about the policies to control this, see Configuring replication policies, Create a replication policy, and Edit a replication policy.
My Preferences - allows each user to select the language of their interface, dark, light, or high contrast theme, and select number of rows and whether the selected row follows the clicked row.

4.6

Table 4. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6.1 | Build 22347688 (Product version: 4.6.1.7681624-a5359f8567)
Release Description
31 AUG 2023 VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6.1 includes important resolved issues and third-party libraries.
In Cloud Director sites, as a provider or as a tenant you can register a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server directly in VMware Cloud Director Availability and Set custom SMTP settings as an alternative of Configure in Cloud Director. For more information, see Events and notifications.
Table 5. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 | Build 21891963 (Product version: 4.6.0.6869101-29b03ba46f)
Release Description
15 JUN 2023 Recovery plans can also be created and run for vSphere DR and migration between vCenter Server sites.
Events and notifications allow auditing the VMware Cloud Director Availability events by using the Cloud Director delivery channel. VMware Cloud Director automatically marks all external events, like the ones received from VMware Cloud Director Availability, as audit events, subject to audit persistence, retention, and export capabilities by using the audit trail system in VMware Cloud Director.

Recovery Settings Enhancements

  • You can map the source and the destination networks per selected replications for on-premises to cloud replications, similarly to the ones from cloud to cloud. For more information, see Configure the network settings for on-premises to cloud replications.

  • vSphere DR and migration validates the recovery settings (data center, VM folder, compute, and others) based on the replication settings (datastore). The network settings are similar to Cloud Director sites, and the source and destination network mappings allow per-virtual machine network mapping. For more information, see Configure recovery settings for vSphere DR and migration.

vSphere to vSphere DR and Migration Public API

  • VMware Cloud Director Availability provides a step-by-step guide to configure a deployed appliance on developer.vmware.com.

  • In the left pane, under Configuration, click OpenApi Client and select an API. For more information, see developer.vmware.com for the API Programming Guide.
NSX-T vApp Edges Support - VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6, backed by VMware Cloud Director 10.3 or later, supports:

Guest Customization Global Setting is a global setting that affects all replications - whether the users need to manually activate or deactivate guest customization on failover. For more information, see Replicate source VM guest customization settings.

Tunnel Appliance High Availability in Cloud Director sites. A second Tunnel Appliance can operate in an active-active mode for high availability of the Tunnel Service, both for new deployments and for upgraded ones. For more information, see Add a second Tunnel Appliance for HA in the Cloud Director site. For information about the two active-active Tunnel Appliance instances, see Deployment architecture in the Cloud Director site.
Replicating vApp templates between Cloud Director sites includes protecting the vApp templates that permit tracking the source for changes, allowing either creating new destination template versions when the source changes or overwriting the destination.

Improved Event Notifications
Bandwidth throttling can also apply throttle for vSphere DR and migration sites.
Note: Applying the limit requires one or more external Replicator Appliance instances.
For information about configuring the provider site throttle limit, see Configure bandwidth throttling to the cloud site.
VMC data engine allows creating migrations back to the on-premises vCenter Server site. For information about all the use cases, see Replicating workloads.

4.5

Table 6. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5.0.1 | Build 21291908 (Product version: 4.5.0.5855303-21231906fd)
Release Description
23 FEB 2023

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5.0.1 includes important resolved issues.
Table 7. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.5 | Build 20795276 (Product version: 4.5.0.5226630-ab9eb01ccb)
Release Description Additional Resources
24 NOV 2022 vSphere DR and migration between vCenter Server sites:
Enhancements in DR and migration to vSphere: the on-premises appliance no longer requires public URL and supports a single-step pairing to the provider site. The pairing from on-premises to a provider no longer requires additional steps for confirming the pairing from the provider site. However, the pairing between two provider sites remains a two-step process, initiated from one provider site, then completed from the other provider site.
Add Replicator appliances in the provider site: in the provider-hosted vCenter Server instance, after configuring the vCenter Replication Management Appliance, you can add one or more Replicator Appliance instances. That scales the performance when replicating tenant vSphere workloads between an on-premises vCenter Server instance and a provider-hosted vCenter Server instance or between provider-hosted vCenter Server instances. Adding Replicator Appliance instances is also supported for existing environments.

The vCenter Lookup Service address entered in the vCenter Replication Management Appliance also applies the same address in all registered and online Replicator Appliance instances without having to manually enter it for each instance.
Recovery settings for vSphere DR and migration: you can preconfigure the destination virtual machines location and compute resource and the network mapping that apply when recovering the workload in the destination site.
View-only vSphere user: VMware Cloud Director Availability supports read-only users and allows users to only monitor replications or administrators to only monitor the system health and the replications. N/A
Replicate encrypted virtual machines: VMware Cloud Director Availability supports replicating virtual machines with an encryption-enabled storage policy, providing end-to-end encryption also in the case for vSphere DR and migration. For more information, see the Prerequisites.
Replications with cloud sites backed by VMware Cloud Director:
Extended control and management of replication policies: cloud to on-premises migrations can be disallowed separately from cloud to cloud migrations. Once the cloud site is upgraded to version 4.5, disallowing migrations to on-premises stops all outgoing migrations to all on-premises appliances in the organization, regardless of their VMware Cloud Director Availability versions.
System-wide notifications to peer sites: these advisories notifications can appear on the top of the VMware Cloud Director Availability pages after creating them in VMware Cloud Director. You can select a priority and duration for showing the message and its audience: to the administrator users, to users within a specific organization, or to the users in all organizations.
VM sizing policy selection: when creating or modifying a replication you can also select a VM sizing policy in addition to the VM placement policy. Within an organization, the VDC compute policies control the compute resources allocation for the recovered workload to several predefined sizes.
View-only system user: VMware Cloud Director Availability supports read-only users and allows users that are not an Organization Administrator to manage replications.
Advanced recovery settings: you can modify the destination network settings, the guest customization, and the guest customization script that are applied when recovering the workload in the destination site.
Clone a replication policy: you can duplicate each selected replication policy by clicking the Clone button.
Replications with any site:
Backup and restore automation: you can schedule the creation and the upload of the VMware Cloud Director Availability appliance backup files to an external server using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
Service and appliance uptime: you can check the uptime of both the services and the appliance on the System Health page. Blog post
Recent Tasks: by expanding this global taskbar on the bottom of the page in the appliances interface, you can see both the system and the replication tasks that recently executed. To filter these tasks by exit criteria, click Running, Failed, or Succeeded. N/A

4.4

Table 8. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4.1 | Build 20153048 (Product version: 4.4.1.4448762-b80bae6591)
Release Description
11 AUG 2022

Support for migrations from legacy vCenter Server versions 5.5 and 6.0. For information about the legacy migrations, see KB 89181.
Table 9. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 | Build 19925810 (Product version: 4.4.0.4187943-d9ddad1830)
Release Description Additional Resources
23 JUN 2022

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 and later can replicate tenant vSphere workloads between an on-premises vCenter Server instance and a provider-hosted vCenter Server instance or between provider-hosted vCenter Server instances. These setups require a new deployment topology. For information about deploying and pairing the new appliances, see the Installation and Configuration Guide in On-Premises and Provider Site document.
One-click migration: you can create a fast migration with a single click, skipping the advanced replication settings configuration.

Migrating vApp templates: when migrating vApp templates between cloud sites backed by VMware Cloud Director, you can migrate the vApp networks with their connectivity and migrate the statuses of "General > Gold_Master" and of Customize VM settings.
Network extension to VMware Cloud on AWS: you can stretch an L2 network to an SDDC in the VMware Cloud on AWS, by using the procedures for stretching an L2 network in the cloud. For information about the required additional Organization Administrator role rights for Organization vDC Gateway: View L2 VPN and Configure L2 VPN in VMware Cloud Director service, see Users roles rights in the Security Guide document. Blog post
Recovery plans execution reports: you can view live step execution progress and see a detailed HTML report for the recovery plan execution that contains replication details and the result of each plan step execution.
RPO compliance: the providers can generate and export Recovery Point Objective (RPO) compliance reports, grouped on an organization level, listing any RPO violations of the protections replicating during a specified period. The reports show whether, in the given period, any protection to the site and from it to on-premises sites meets or violates its RPO. The currently generated report can be viewed either in the interface, or in an HTML format and optionally exported as a TSV file.
Managed service replication assignment: you can select the tenant organization as a default owner for new replications or leave the system administrator as a default owner.
Remote site compatibility pre-upgrade check: when upgrading the cloud site, in the Update wizard, you can see which paired on-premises appliances are incompatible with the upgrade version. After upgrading, in the Peer Sites page you can also filter them by compatibility status.
Replication alignment with the destination storage profile: when creating new replications the disk type is provisioned depending on whether the storage policy allows thin provisioning in the Cloud Director organization VDC. After creating a replication, the disk provisioning type never changes.
Cloud collection of support bundles: you can allow log collection from the On-Premises to Cloud Director Replication Appliance during the initial configuration and pairing of the appliance and during re-pairing with a Cloud Director site. To simplify troubleshooting, activate log collection from the cloud, allowing the providers to easily obtain new on-premises support bundles.
Endpoints resource capacity filter: VMware Cloud Director Availability shows the destination required resources of the replications provisioned on a failover. For information about monitoring the required resources, see: Monitor the required resources as a tenant and Monitor the required resources as a provider.
On the Dashboard page or in the top navigation bar, you can directly submit product feedback by clicking Feedback.

4.3

Table 10. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3.1 | Build 19512740 (Product version: 4.3.1.3711151-a5e4c62e75)
Release Description
7 APR 2022 Migrating vApp Templates: the templates represent primary copies of virtual machines, ready for instantiating. Migrating vApp templates to a site allows the tenants to deploy consistently configured virtual machines across multiple VMware Cloud Director instances.
Previous VMware Cloud Director Availability versions supported creating L2 sessions by selecting Edge Gateways scoped only to an organization VDC in VMware Cloud Director. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3.1 and later also support selecting Edge Gateways that are scoped to a data center group.
Table 11. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 | Build 18930473 (Product version: 4.3.0.3095245-9308521ec0)
Release Description Additional Resources
23 NOV 2021

Select endpoint address for each network adapter: in a Replicator Appliance instance or in a Tunnel Appliance with multiple network interfaces, you can specify which of the network adapters to use for local site communication.

Blog post
Tunnel connectivity: the following new sections 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.

N/A
Replacing the Cloud Service certificate without impacting paired on-premises: 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. Blog post
Multisite cloud to cloud authentication: when multiple Availability cloud sites use a single VMware Cloud Director instance you can use multisite authentication for performing regular replication operations when prompted to extend the session from Availability site A to Availability site B. Blog post

The 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.

For example, the following four retention rules keep a total of 24 rotated instances.

  • 10 instances, over distance 10 minutes unit - Retention period: 100 minutes.
  • 10 instances, over distance 1 hours unit - Retention period: 10 hours.
  • 2 instances, over distance 3 days unit - Retention period: 6 days.
  • 2 instances, over distance 2 months unit - Retention period: 4 months.
Add virtual machines in existing vApp groups: you can group one or several new virtual machines to an already existing vApp replication from an on-premises site to the cloud site. Blog post
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.
You can set the shortest RPO as 1 minute by using the slider for RPO. To meet shorter RPO, verify that you follow the recommendations for lowering the RPO violations occurrence and see the Replication Flow document. An I/O intensive workload protected with shorter RPO can cause RPO violations.

4.2

Table 12. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.2.1 | Build 18422625 (Product version: 4.2.1.2610807-98aa4437ed)
Release Description
12 AUG 2021

Support for NSX Data Center for vSphere in addition to NSX-T Data Center support for Stretching On-Premises Layer 2 Networks, with some operational caveats and limitations.
Table 13. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.2 | Build 18136536 (Product version: 4.2.0.2352022-853b942e14)
Release Description Additional Resources
10 JUN 2021

Stretching on-premises layer 2 networks: the service providers can stretch the on-premises networks across the cloud site for migrations from the on-premises site to the cloud site that allow network connectivity between already migrated and not yet migrated virtual machines as in the same network segment, with some operational caveats and limitations. Layer 2 VPN (L2 VPN) stretches the L2 networks across the sites.

Migration to Cloud Director service: the new H4DM Service can migrate workloads to the VMware Cloud Director service after deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.2 or later in VMware Cloud on AWS, with some operational caveats and limitations. Both the service providers and their tenants, can use the existing migration flow and migrate their workloads to the VMware Cloud Director service.

4.1

Table 14. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.1 | Build 17222554 (Product version: 4.1.0.1660207-48e5972493)
Release Description Additional Resources
26 NOV 2020

Create replications for encrypted virtual machines: VMware Cloud Director Availability supports replicating virtual machines with an encryption-enabled storage policy in VMware Cloud Director, from one cloud site to another cloud site, providing end-to-end encryption. To replicate encrypted virtual machines, verify that vCenter Server 6.7 U3 or later, VMware Cloud Director 10.1 or later, and VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.1 or later are installed in both the source cloud site and in the destination cloud sites.

 Blog post
Event notifications for tenants: tenants can receive replication events notifications by email and as VMware Cloud Director event notifications.
Multisite Cloud Director authentication: you can use your external identity provider to authenticate to the remote site and manage geographically distributed installations as single entities.

Blog post

Separate migrations and protections usage: the service provider can separately enable incoming and outgoing migrations and protections in the replication policies.

4.0

Table 15. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0 | Build 16295568
Release Description Additional Resources
02 JUN 2020

Storage reporting: VMware Cloud Director Availability shows the disk space used by each virtual machine replication and aggregates the disk usage information per organization. You can monitor the disk usage for every replication in all directions. You can also monitor the disk usage for every organization.

YouTube video
For tenant onboarding, storage, network, and usage reporting: VMware Cloud Director Availability provides public APIs that help to onboard tenants, and see the storage usage, the network settings, and the compute resource usage of the replications. For more information, on the documentation landing page see the API guide for your version under Other resources. N/A
Event notifications: you can monitor the event notifications that VMware Cloud Director Availability generates either by using a syslog server or in Cloud Director by monitoring the VMware Cloud Director Availability events.
SLA profiles: you can define and control the following Service Level Agreement (SLA) replications settings: Recovery Point Objective (RPO), retention policy for the point-in-time instances, quiescing, compression, and initial synchronization time by using SLA profiles that can be assigned to organizations.

YouTube video
Bandwidth throttling: you can configure a limit for the replication data traffic from the on-premises to cloud sites. You can also set a global limit for the total incoming replication traffic from all cloud sites. N/A
In the source site with vCenter Server 7.0 and ESXi 7.0, when resizing the disk of the source virtual machine, VMware Cloud Director Availability automatically resizes the protected virtual machine disk in the destination site, running any supported vSphere version. The existing replication instances are retained. Failover and Test Failover are supported from any instance, before and after the disk resizing. Until the replication instances before the resizing expire, the replica files continue to take the additional storage space. To save storage space, you can remove the old replication instances or change the retention policy.
Stored instances: to restore a workload to a previous state, you can use point-in-time or stored instances. To avoid the automatic retention of point-in-time instances, you can store particular point-in-time instances. The stored instances do not change and you can use them to recover the workload to the stored instance, regardless of the overall retention period of the point-in-time instances.

3.5 and earlier versions

Table 16. VMware Cloud Director Availability 3.5 | Build 15038129
Release Description Additional Resources
14 NOV 2019 Grouping VMs in a replication: for on-premises to cloud replications, multiple virtual machines can be grouped and managed as a single unit, to specify boot order and boot delay settings. N/A

  • Using replications: in the Tenant Portal or in the vSphere Client Plug-In, you can protect or migrate workloads by replicating vApps or virtual machines.

  • Create a migration: migrate a vApp or a virtual machine to a remote organization, and run the workload in the destination site, by configuring a migration. After a successful replication in the destination site, you can power on the source virtual machine in the destination site.

  • Create a protection: protect a vApp or a virtual machine from one organization to another, and keep the workload running in the source site, by configuring a protection. If the source site is unavailable, after a successful replication you can fail over and power on the source virtual machine in the destination site.

  • Performing test failover, failover, and reverse: protect or migrate workloads by replicating vApps or virtual machines. Then, from or to on-premises sites you can test a failover, fail over, and reverse failover workloads to or from cloud sites.
  • Evacuate the replication data from a datastore: to perform maintenance operations on a local datastore in the cloud site, you must first remove all incoming replications and replication data placed on that datastore. To evacuate the replications from the datastore at once, you apply an alternative storage policy to all incoming replications on the datastore.
  • Replicator Service maintenance mode: to prepare a Replicator Service instance for maintenance without disrupting replications, you can evacuate the incoming replications from the Replicator Service instance to other local Replicator Service instances in the cloud site.
  • Rebalance replications: to distribute the incoming replications evenly over all Replicator instances in the site, you can rebalance the replications.

  • Monitor tenant traffic: as a tenant, you can see a traffic data chart for your organization. The chart shows the bytes of transferred data for the last five hours, up to two months.

 YouTube video
Configuring replication policies: replication policies are sets of rules that define and control the replication attributes on a Cloud Director organization level. YouTube video
Pair cloud sites: cloud to cloud pairing is possible over private networks, without allowing public administrative access and without providing the remote site credentials. N/A
Selecting replicated disks: you can exclude or include virtual machine hard drives in replications.
Configuring network settings of replications to the cloud: you can configure the replications network settings in the destination cloud site.