VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 Release Notes
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 is now ready for customers to use. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 now supports the following new functionality.
Advanced Retention Rules
Now providers can set more than one rule for retention of the instances. Up to five different retention rules can store instances with a granularity that is changing over time.
For example, the following four retention rules keep a total of 24 rotated instances.
- 10 instances, over distance 10 minutes unit - Retention period: 100 minutes.
- 10 instances, over distance 1 hours unit - Retention period: 10 hours.
- 2 instances, over distance 3 days unit - Retention period: 6 days.
- 2 instances, over distance 2 months unit - Retention period: 4 months.
This update allows for a flexible process recovery readiness within a single set of retention rules, regardless of whether the problem occurred 10 minutes or 3 months ago.
DR and Migration Plans (new functionality)
Orchestrate and schedule the recovery and the migration operations across multiple virtual machines and vApps by using plans with sequences of delayable and pausable steps, containing execution settings and existing virtual machines and vApps replications references.
1-Minute Target Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
If in the previous version of Availability the shortest possible RPO interval was 5 minutes, now the shortest RPO length can be set to 1 minute. The RPO period can be set using the RPO slider when configuring replications, SLA profiles, or replication policies. To achieve a shorter RPO, make sure you follow the recommendations to reduce RPO violations and look for details. Intense I / O workloads protected by a shorter RPO can cause RPO violations.
1-15min RPO setup is possible when backing up to the premium TIER SSD. The cloud storages in the base price are not powerful enough to provide this functionality.
Multisite Cloud to Cloud Authentication
The client no longer needs to log in to VMware Cloud Director separately for each cloud site to perform replication operations. Background Multisite functionality now allows you to manage all of your customer's available cloud sites from a single web interface.
On-Premises Authentication by Using a Token
With vCenter Server 7.0 or later, a new authentication mechanism for the on-premises tenants allows performing disaster recovery operations in the vSphere Client Plug-In that require authentication to the cloud site.
When the organization uses an external identity provider, for example, SAML, the on-premises tenants can now use that method for authentication.
Add Virtual Machines in Existing vApp Groups
Now, you can group one or several new virtual machines to an already existing vApp replication from on-premises to the cloud.
Placement Policies
Now the system providers and their tenants can select a placement organization VDC compute policy for a specific cluster or host for the recovered virtual machine.
Optimized Reverse
If the original source disks have not been modified in any way at the time of the restore operation, then full synchronization will now be skipped, transmitting only the changed deltas.
Replacing the Cloud Service Certificate Without Impacting Paired On-Premises
Now the paired on-premises appliances verify the entire SSL certificate chain of the Cloud Service. As a result, when replacing the certificate with a valid CA-signed certificate, the paired on-premises appliances do not need re-pairing with the cloud site.
Improved Replicating Workloads
Previously, the customer could only use replications of the VMware core service, and the service provider could implement Availability replications. The customer can now also apply replication to the Availability paid service. With the previous version, the client could not replicate a virtual machine that had Replication from a Service Provider on it. This was always preceded by support ticket communication between the customer and the service provider. Now the client can make a new Availability replication and the old one will be deleted automatically.
Read more about VMware release notes:
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 Release Notes
VMware Cloud Director Availability DR and Migration Plans
New Replication Settings in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3