«

»

vCloud Director 9.7 Released

A few days ago, 209-03-28, VMware released a new version of vCloud Director meaning latest and greatest version is now 9.7.

With version 9.7 the vCloud Director virtual appliance (VA) comes with both the cell and database, PostgreSQL 10, functionality so there is no need to use an external database anymore if you’re going down the appliance route. This is really good for all of you, myself included that likes the VA route.

The VA provides a high availability option where yo install one VA including both Cell and DB (primary) functionality plus two more VAs with Cell and DB (secondary) functionality. On top of that you can instal additional VAs with Cell functionality if required.

Each VA now comes with two NICs, one for vCD external traffic including UI and API and one for DB traffic.

Another enhancement is the Flex Allocation Model meaning there are now five Allocation Models available:

  • Elastic Allocation Pool
  • Non Elastic Allocation Pool
  • Flex Pay-As-You-Go
  • Reservation Pool

The Flex allocation model plus Compute Policies gives you an option to both control CPU & Memory consumption at the VDC level as well as for virtual machines. You can also, by using compute policies, make sure that a VM or a set of VMs always runs on specific hosts meaning controlling VM to Host placement. This means same as we have had in vSphere using DRS rules for a long time. Same business cases can be applied at vCloud Director meaning e.g. application licenses only for X of Y hosts.

The Flex allocation model also supports all allocation configuration available in the existing allocation models.  I need to test the new Flex model before I make a final judgement about it but it looks pretty promising.

In addition to the VA changes mentioned above and the new Flex Allocation Model which I think are really good, there are other improvements as well:

  • Proxy Access to Tenant dedicated vCenter Servers via vCloud Director
    • The registered vCenter Servers will not be used by any Provider VDC, it will be a dedicated vCenter Server with all its resources assigned to the specific Tenant.
  • HTML5 Tenant Portal
    • Customise the UI look and feel per Tenant
    • Global Search
    • Improved Org VDC Network configuration
    • Network Diagram view for vApp
  • HTML5 Provider Portal – Mostly around the workflow
  • NSX Edge Placement control – vCD will place the edges in dedicated vSphere clusters and not mix them with any Tenant (compute) workloads.
  • New API – version 32.0
  • Teraform Provider 2.0
  • Role based Access Control for vContainer Service Extension (CSE)

For future planning it might be good to know that vCD 9.7 is the last release (as of information available today) to support:

  • MS SQL as the vCD Database, only PostgreSQL will be supported.
  • API versions 28.0 are marked for deprecation. Switching right now, unless you’ve already done so, to version 32.0, 31.0, 30.0, 29.0

Useful Links

What’s New in vCloud Director 9.7

vCloud Director 9.7 Release Notes

vCloud Director 9.7 Download (click VMware vCloud Director if you’re not automatically directed to the download page

VMware vRealize Orchestrator Plug-In for vCloud Director 9.7

VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes

4 pings

Comments have been disabled.