Before deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability, verify that the disaster recovery environment in the cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director™ satisfies the following requirements for the appliances.

Deployment Types and Hardware Requirements

In all cloud sites backed by VMware Cloud Director, deploy all the appliances of VMware Cloud Director Availability by using a single installation OVA file. For information about the appliances location in the disaster recovery infrastructure, see Deployment architecture in the Cloud Director site.

Depending on scale and deployment goals, you can select various deployment roles. The following table describes the virtual appliances of VMware Cloud Director Availability in a cloud site and their hardware requirements from a hosting perspective.
Appliance deployment role Description and services Hardware requirements
Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance
Important: As a provider, before configuring any replications you must add each instance of Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance for metering in VMware vCloud ® Usage Meter. For information about adding the appliances in vCloud Usage Meter, see vCloud Usage Meter Integration.
A dedicated appliance role, that runs the following VMware Cloud Director Availability services:
  • Manager Service
  • Cloud Service with embedded VMware Cloud Director Availability Tenant Portal

Deploy one Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance for configuring replications from and to cloud sites backed by VMware Cloud Director.
  • 2 vCPUs
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 10 GB Storage
Replicator Appliance A dedicated appliance role for the Replicator Service that handles the replication traffic in a cloud site.
For large-scale environments, you can deploy more than one Replicator Appliance instance per cloud site. Depending on the cloud site type, to add more instances:
  • 8 vCPUs
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 10 GB Storage
Tunnel Appliance A dedicated appliance role for the Tunnel Service.

Since VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6, in cloud sites backed by VMware Cloud Director a second Tunnel Appliance can be configured for high availability. For more information, see Add a second Tunnel Appliance for HA in the Cloud Director site.
  • 4 vCPUs
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 10 GB Storage
Only for testing: Cloud Director Combined Appliance An all-in-one appliance role, only suitable for testing and evaluation environments. This Cloud Director Combined Appliance includes all VMware Cloud Director Availability services:
  • Manager Service
  • Replicator Service
  • Cloud Service with embedded VMware Cloud Director Availability Tenant Portal
  • Tunnel Service
  • 4 vCPUs
  • 6 GB RAM
  • 10 GB Storage
Only for vSphere DR and migration: vCenter Replication Management Appliance
Note: For information about this appliance role and about deploying and configuring vSphere DR and migration, see Installing and configuring the appliances for vSphere DR and migration in the Installation, Configuration, and Upgrade Guide in On-Premises and Provider Site.
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.4 introduces this appliance role, only suitable for vSphere DR and migration, with no backing VMware Cloud Director. This vCenter Replication Management Appliance includes the following active VMware Cloud Director Availability services:
  • Manager Service
  • Replicator Service
  • Tunnel Service
Important: As a provider, before configuring any replications you must add each instance of vCenter Replication Management Appliance for metering in VMware vCloud ® Usage Meter. For information about adding the appliances in vCloud Usage Meter, see vCloud Usage Meter Integration.
  • 8 vCPUs
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 10 GB Storage

For information about each service and on which appliance it runs, see Services and for the network connectivity between the services, see Network requirements and prerequisites in the Cloud Director site.

Deployment Requirements

In a cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director, deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability requires:

  • Resource vCenter Server Lookup service
    Use the resource vCenter Server Lookup service instance, when in a single site several vCenter Server instances are dedicated for different tasks:
    • vCenter Server instances dedicated for management operations.
    • vCenter Server instances dedicated as VMware Cloud Director resources.
    VMware Cloud Director Availability uses the resource vCenter Server instances for locating and authenticating to resources and create or edit inventory objects. Register the Replicator Service instances and the Cloud Service, and optionally, the Tunnel Service and the Manager Service, with the vCenter Server Lookup service, provided by the Platform Services Controller used by the resource vCenter Server instances.
  • Availability instances per VMware Cloud Director server group
    In each cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director, deploy one or more instances of Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance per a VMware Cloud Director server group. The server group in VMware Cloud Director consists of a VMware Cloud Director cell and a resource vCenter Server with at least one ESXi host.

    For information about deploying multiple instances, see Deploying Multiple VMware Cloud Director Availability Instances in VMware Cloud Director.

  • Certificate of VMware Cloud Director
    VMware Cloud Director Availability verifies the VMware Cloud Director host name in its certificate. The CommonName or at least one of the entries in the Subject Alternative Name must match the VMware Cloud Director FQDN or IP used when registering it in VMware Cloud Director Availability.
  • Deactivate vApps discovery and adoption in VMware Cloud Director
    VMware Cloud Director vApps discovery and adoption must not be active. For more information, see Discovering and Adopting vApps in the VMware Cloud Director documentation.
  • Dedicated ESXi replication VMkernel interfaces
    To isolate the replication data traffic in the ESXi hosts, dedicate a VMkernel interface for that. By default, ESXi handles the replication data traffic through its management VMkernel interface. Since one VMkernel adapter must handle one traffic type, separate the management traffic from the replication traffic by creating a dedicated replication VMkernel interface.

    In every ESXi host that is used as a replication source or as a replication destination, when creating a VMkernel interface dedicated for the replication traffic, use the following tags:

    • For replication sources, to configure each ESXi host for the outgoing replication traffic, select vSphere Replication. For more information, see Set Up a VMkernel Adapter for vSphere Replication Traffic on a Source Host in the vSphere Replication documentation.
    • For replication destinations, to configure each ESXi host for the incoming replication traffic, select vSphere Replication NFC.

    To keep the replication traffic between the ESXi hosts and the Replicator Service instances in the same broadcast domain, configure the dedicated replication VMkernel interface in its own IP subnet and connect each Replicator Service instance to the same virtual port group. As a result, the uncompressed replication traffic avoids crossing a router and saves network bandwidth.

VMware Cloud Director Availability Storage Requirements

Note: Replica files keep expanding until there is space on the datastore, disregarding any restrictions in VMware Cloud Director:

VMware Cloud Director Availability resizes the independent disks associated with the replicated virtual machines to represent the actual used space by the replica data. That causes VMware Cloud Director to display the actual allocation size, which might be greater than the configured allocation size limit of the organization VDC.

For both test failover and for reverse operations, and when using seed, the destination storage must accommodate double the space for the disk size of the source virtual machine during the test failover, as in the following two examples.

Since VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.2, for a failover this does not apply and the storage space equals the source workload size during the failover.
  • Example required space in the datastore, for a test failover of a source virtual machine with a 2 TB virtual disk:
    1. When creating the replication, VMware Cloud Director Availability allocates 2 TB of space in the destination storage.
    2. When starting a test failover, VMware Cloud Director Availability allocates additional 2 TB, for a total of 4 TB allocated space in the destination storage during the test failover.
    3. After finishing the test failover cleanup task, the additional 2 TB space is unallocated, remaining with 2 TB allocated space in the destination storage when the test failover completes.
  • Example required space by a test failover, for VMware vSAN storage, with the same virtual machine:

    The same storage space implication applies - the vSAN must accommodate double the disk size of the virtual machine for a test failover. When creating the replication in this example, VMware Cloud Director Availability allocates 2 TB multiplied by the vSAN_Protection_Level_Disk_Space_Penalty. When starting a test failover, additional 2 TB are allocated multiplied by the vSAN_Protection_Level_Disk_Space_Penalty. For more information, see About vSAN Policies and Planning Capacity in vSAN in the vSphere documentation.

Supported Topologies

The resource vCenter Server instances within a cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director must be within the same single sign-on (SSO) domain. All Replicator Service, Manager Service, Cloud Service, and Tunnel Service instances within the respective site must be configured with that same SSO domain. For diagrams showing all services in the cloud site and a diagram showing multiple VMware Cloud Director Availability instances, see Deployment architecture in the Cloud Director site.