The VMware Cloud Director multisite feature allows a cloud provider or a tenant of multiple, geographically distributed VMware Cloud Director installations (server groups) to manage and monitor those installations and their organizations as single entities.

You can deploy and configure VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension within a multisite VMware Cloud Director architecture. By configuring VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension within a multisite architecture, you allow tenant users to preview and download objects in remote sites.

With the multisite feature, you achieve high availability and provide a single point of data access for organization users.

Within a multisite architecture, you can configure VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances with a standalone virtual data center in each site. The following diagram illustrates the architecture.

A configuration where VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension multisite instances use virtual data centers belonging to the respective site.

You can also configure VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances in different sites to use a single virtual data center. The following diagram illustrates the architecture.

A configuration where VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension multisite instances use a single virtual data center.

When you configure the multisite feature, you create a cluster of multiple VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances to create an availability zone. You can group the VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances together only in a single region. A region is a collection of compute resources in a geographic area. Regions are isolated and independent of one another. VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension does not support multi-region architectures.

You can share the same buckets and objects across tenant organizations within a multisite environment. To share buckets and objects across sites, map all tenant organizations to the same storage group. See Edit Tenant Mapping Configuration.

Multisite Deployment Requirements for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

When you configure the multisite feature with VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension, consider the following requirements.
  • Associate the VMware Cloud Director sites that you want to use in the multisite environment. For more information, see the VMware Cloud Director Cloud Provider Admin Portal Guide.
  • Deploy and configure a VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instance in each site.
  • You can share your storage platform cluster across sites, or you can deploy and configure all required storage components in each site.
  • Join the storage clusters into a distribution group.

    For Cloudian HyperStore, set up a storage policy with a multi-DC data distribution group.

    For ECS, set up replication groups across the virtual data centers.

  • For AWS S3, use the same AWS payer account to configure VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension. Also, make sure that all VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension sites are configured with an AWS S3 endpoint in the same region.