You can deploy and configure VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension within a multisite VMware Cloud Director architecture, and within a multi-region architecture.

Multisite Deployment

A site refers to a VMware Cloud Director instance, which runs within a standalone geolocation. The VMware Cloud Director multisite feature enables a service 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.

By configuring VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension within a multisite architecture, you enable 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.

Multi-region Deployment

A region refers to an object storage cluster, which runs within a standalone geolocation, with a unique S3 API endpoint. The VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension multi-region feature allows the cloud provider to group multiple regions of object storage clusters to a central management plane, on a single VMware Cloud Director site, or across multiple VMware Cloud Director sites.

By grouping multi-region object storage clusters, you can activate S3 regions for specific tenant organizations and tenant users can create buckets within the multi-regions.

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension 2.2 supports the multi-region feature on the Cloudian platform.

Multisite and Multi-region Topologies

You can configure multisite VMware Cloud Director instances with multi-region object storage clusters within the following configurations:
  • Multisite single region topology
  • Single site multi-region topology
  • Multisite multi-region topology

Multisite Single Region Topology

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 Service 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.

Single Site Multi-region Topology

When you deploy multi-region object storage clusters, you can deploy one VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension server to each object storage cluster. You can connect multiple VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension servers to the same VMware Cloud Director site. The following diagram illustrates the architecture.

A diagram that illustrates a configuration where VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances in a single site use multiple regions.

Multisite Multi-Region Topology

When you deploy multi-region object storage clusters, you can associate multi-region object storage to multisite VMware Cloud Director instances. You can deploy one VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension server to each object storage cluster. The VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension servers connect to the multisite VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension. On both the local and remote sites, tenant users can use multi-region object storage with a multisite VMware Cloud Director topology. The following diagram illustrates the architecture.

A diagram that illustrates a configuration where VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension instances in multiple sites use multiple regions.