Terminology in VMware Cloud Director Availability

See this glossary for the terms in VMware Cloud Director Availability documentation.

Appliance: VMware Cloud Director Availability consists of one or multiple appliances, depending on the site where they reside in:


Cloud site backed by:	Cloud site appliance roles:	On-premises site appliance roles:
VMware Cloud Director	Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance: An appliance that manages replications in a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance deployed in a cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director. Tunnel Appliance instances: One or, two appliances in an active-active mode, that provide the ingress and egress secure SSL communication in a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance. Replicator Appliance instances: One or more appliances that handle the replication of data in a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance.	On-premises to Cloud Director Replication Appliance: An appliance that is deployed in the on-premises site to replicate vSphere workloads between an on-premises vCenter Server instance and a provider cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director.
VMware vCenter Server	vCenter Replication Management Appliance: An appliance that manages replications in a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance deployed in a provider cloud vCenter site. Replicator Appliance instances: Optionally, one or more appliances handle the replication of data in a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance.	On-premises to Cloud vCenter Replication Appliance: An appliance that is deployed in the on-premises site to replicate vSphere workloads between an on-premises vCenter Server instance and a provider cloud vCenter Server site.

Architectures:
- Cloud Director site: A multi-tenant provider cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director to manage and offer disaster recovery and migration services to multiple tenants using VMware Cloud Director Availability instances. These instances consist of a Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance, one or more Replicator Appliances, and one or two Tunnel Appliances for high availability. The Cloud Director sites can interoperate both with other Cloud Director sites and with on-premises sites.
- Cloud vCenter site: A provider cloud site where a cloud service provider deploys a vCenter Server instance to offer disaster recovery and migration services to tenants using a VMware Cloud Director Availability instance. This instance consists of a vCenter Replication Management Appliance and optionally one or more Replicator Appliances. The cloud vCenter sites can interoperate with other cloud vCenter sites or with on-premises sites.
- On-premises sites: Tenants' on-premises vCenter Server sites can protect and migrate their workloads to a provider cloud site using VMware Cloud Director Availability On-Premises Appliance. The tenants deploy the appliance and select its role which can be either an On-Premises to Cloud Director Replication Appliance or an On-Premises to Cloud vCenter Replication Appliance, depending on the type of the provider cloud site. On-premises sites can interoperate only with either a Cloud Director site or a cloud vCenter site.
Asynchronous replication: A data replication method where changes to the primary data are not immediately replicated to the secondary data, but instead are queued and replicated later.
Availability cloud site: A provider cloud site where VMware Cloud Director Availability is deployed to offer disaster recovery and migration services.
Backup: The entire configuration of VMware Cloud Director Availability can be stored in a compressed file, either locally or on an SFTP server.
Cloud provider: Offers cloud-based infrastructure, platform, or software services to customers. These services are accessed by their tenants through a web browser or API. Depending on whether the site is backed by VMware Cloud Director, the provider deploys VMware Cloud Director Availability instances using the appropriate appliances' roles in their vCenter Server instance.
Deployment: The process of installing and configuring the VMware Cloud Director Availability appliances.
Deployment topology: The placement of components in the disaster recovery environment and how they are connected to each other.
Destination: The site to which data is being replicated. The destination can either be the on-premises site, the cloud vCenter Server site, or the multi-tenant cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director.
Disaster recovery: Refers to an organization’s method of regaining access and functionality to its IT infrastructure after events like a natural disaster, cyber attack, or business disruptions. Disaster recovery relies upon the replication of the workload in an off-premises site not affected by the disaster. VMware Cloud Director Availability provides continuous availability of the protected workloads and automates their recovery operations.
Disaster recovery protection: The process of protecting the workloads and their data from disasters by replicating them to a secondary site. Also, see Protection.
DRaaS: Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, a cloud-based service that provides disaster recovery protection for virtual workloads.
ESXi: An operating system-independent bare-metal hypervisor software installed on servers that can use the physical hardware to create one or more virtual machines (VMs).
Failover: The process of switching to a redundant site in the event of a failure or outage of the primary site.
Failover workflows: Workflows that define the steps to take when failing over workloads to another site in the event of a disaster or outage.
In-context integration: Integration of one product or service with another in a way that is seamless and intuitive for the user. For example, the VMware Cloud Director Availability plug-ins for vSphere and for VMware Cloud Director offer native integration in context without switching interfaces.
Migration: The process of moving data or applications from one location to another. For example, when the primary location is about to be decommissioned.
Multi-tenant cloud: A provider cloud computing architecture where multiple tenants share the same infrastructure and resources but are logically isolated from each other. For example, VMware Cloud Director Availability cloud site, backed by VMware Cloud Director.
On-Premises Appliance: An appliance that enables tenants to protect and migrate their workloads from an on-premises vCenter Server site to a provider cloud site.
On-premises site: A site where VMware Cloud Director Availability and vCenter Server are deployed on-premises within the own facilities of an organization.
Partner Connect Program: A program through which VMware partners can provide VMware Cloud Director Availability.
Protection: The safeguarding of vApps and virtual machines against disasters or unavailability. VMware Cloud Director Availability provides a range of protection services, including disaster recovery, migration, failover, and reverse failover to ensure the continuous availability of the workloads and automate the recovery operations. Protection is achieved through asynchronous replications between cloud sites or between cloud sites and on-premises sites.
Provider cloud site: A site where a cloud service provider offers cloud disaster recovery and migration services to tenant users by using VMware Cloud Director Availability.
Quiesce: The process of pausing or altering a device or application to achieve a consistent state, usually in preparation for a backup or other maintenance. In VMware Cloud Director Availability, quiescing is used to prepare the virtual machines for replication, by creating a snapshot of their memory and then pausing them so that no new data gets written to their disks during replication. The quiescing ensures that the replicated virtual machine is in a consistent state and that no data gets lost during replication.
Recovery point objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss acceptable in case of a disaster. The RPO is the maximum amount of time that can elapse between creating a replica and a disaster.
Replication: The process of transferring workload data from the source site to the destination site to allow for protecting, migrating, failing over, and reversing the workload between the two sites.
Replication policy: A set of rules that define and control the replication settings on a Cloud Director organization level.
Restore: Once backed up, the appliances configuration can be restored using the interface of VMware Cloud Director Availability.
Reverse: After performing migration or failover, perform reverse to failback the workload from the destination site to the original source site.
Site: A physical location where vSphere workloads are hosted. In VMware Cloud Director Availability, the site can be either an on-premises site or a cloud site.
Source: The site from which data is being replicated. The source can either be an on-premises vCenter Server instance, a cloud vCenter Server site, or a multi-tenant cloud site backed by VMware Cloud Director.
Seed: A seed is a vApp or a VM transferred to the destination site before starting a replication to reduce the network traffic and the time for the initial synchronization. The seed is created using different methods, such as offline data transfer, cloning, failover, or copying over the network.
SLA profile: Service Level Agreement profiles define replication settings, such as recovery point objective (RPO), retention policy for point-in-time instances, quiescing, compression, and initial synchronization time. The provider controls them at once by assigning the SLA profile to multiple VMware Cloud Director organizations.
Tenant: A customer user of the cloud provider's services to host and run the tenant's applications. In a multi-tenant environment, multiple tenants share the same infrastructure resources, while their data and applications remain isolated from each other ensuring security and privacy. Tenants deploy an On-Premises Appliance in their vCenter Server sites, choosing the appliance role depending on the cloud site type.
Tenant self-service protection: The ability for tenant users to manage their disaster recovery protection using self-service tools provided by their cloud provider. The tenants can protect their virtual machines or vApps on their own.
Test failover: Testing allows you to validate that the data from the source site replicates correctly in the destination site.
Unified architecture: An architecture that integrates multiple components into a single, cohesive system. For example, the appliances of VMware Cloud Director Availability in a cloud site.
vApp: A virtual application, or vApp, is a container that packages one or more virtual machines along with their associated virtual disks, virtual network interfaces, and other resources. The vApp is a collection of virtual machines that are grouped together for management purposes. In VMware Cloud Director Availability, a vApp can be used to protect and migrate a group of virtual machines as a single unit.
vCenter Server: A centralized management utility for virtual machines, multiple ESXi hosts, and all dependent components from a single location. Required at each VMware Cloud Director Availability site.
vCloud Availability: The former name of VMware Cloud Director Availability.
vCloud Usage Meter: A tool that meters the usage of VMware products and services by providers and tenants.
VM: A virtual machine is a software-based emulation of a physical computer. It can run its own operating system and applications, like a physical computer. VMs are created and managed by virtualization software, such as vSphere, which allows multiple VMs to run on a single physical host machine. VMware Cloud Director Availability can replicate a virtual machine from a source site to a destination site, allowing failing it over, migrating to another site, or returning it back.
VMware Cloud Director: A cloud management platform that enables the delivery of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) across multiple clouds.
VMware Cloud Director Availability: A Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution that protects, migrates, fails-over, and reverses failover of vApps and virtual machines between multi-tenant clouds and on-premises with asynchronous replications.
vSphere: A cloud computing virtualization platform allowing running application workloads on virtual machines. vCenter Server and ESXi are core components.
vSphere workloads: Users' workloads that run on the vSphere platform.
vSphere DR and migration: Disaster recovery and migration capabilities for vSphere workloads between vCenter Server sites using VMware Cloud Director Availability.