VMware Cloud Director Availability™ is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution. In multi-tenant clouds, VMware Cloud Director Availability provides asynchronous replications, failover, and migrations for vApps and for virtual machines. VMware Cloud Director Availability is available through the VMware Cloud Provider Program.
- From an on-premises vCenter Server site to a VMware Cloud Director site
- From a VMware Cloud Director site to an on-premises vCenter Server site
- From one VMware Cloud Director site to another VMware Cloud Director site
In a single cloud environment, a Cloud Tunnel Appliance, a Cloud Replication Management Appliance, and a Cloud Replicator Appliance operate together in a VMware Cloud Director site to form the VMware Cloud Director Availability stack. It supports the management of the replications, the secure communication, and the storage of the replicated data. Service providers can support recovery for many tenant environments that can scale to handle increasing loads.
In an on-premises environment, a single VMware Cloud Director Availability On-Premises Appliance supports the replication management for tenants by using the VMware Cloud Director Availability vSphere Client Plug-In.
Looking for vCloud Availability Documentation?
Since June 2020, vCloud Availability changed its product name to VMware Cloud Director Availability. For the new names of the services and appliances, see VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0 Release Notes.
What's New in the VMware Cloud Director Availability Documentation
- You can pair on-premises and cloud sites with different VMware Cloud Director Availability versions. By pairing an earlier and the latest versions, you can migrate workloads from source sites where the latest VMware Cloud Director Availability does not support either the version of vCenter Server or VMware Cloud Director. For the interoperability between paired sites, see Managing Connections Between Cloud Sites.
- After changing the vCenter Single Sign-On credentials used to register VMware Cloud Director Availability with the vCenter Server Lookup service, you must repair the components and the paired sites. For more information, see Configure After Changing the vCenter Single Sign-On Credentials.
- You can replace a failing Cloud Tunnel Appliance by powering it off and deploying a new instance of the appliance. For more information, see Restore a Cloud Tunnel Appliance.
- In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0, you can see the disk space used by each virtual machine replication and the aggregated disk use information per organization. For more information, see Monitoring the Disk Usage.
- You can monitor the event notifications that VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0 generates either by using a syslog server or in VMware Cloud Director by monitoring the VMware Cloud Director Availability events. For more information, see Cloud Event Notifications.
- In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0, 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. For more information, see Bandwidth Throttling.
- In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0, you can modify the network settings of the appliance by using the appliance management interface that supports multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs). For more information, see Network Settings Configuration.
- In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0, 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. For more information, see Configuring SLA Profiles.
- In VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0, you can see the compute resource requirements of the replications that are required on a failover. This information provides you with the required destination capacity, the virtual CPU, and memory resources to fail over the protected workloads successfully to the destination site. For more information, see Monitoring the Resource Requirements.
- 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, in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0 you can store particular point-in-time instances. For more information, see Using Instances.