VMware Cloud Availability (vCAv) is a solution provided by VMware to Service Providers to offer DRaaS with VMware Cloud Director(vCD) as a target.
Two features that makes VMware vCloud Availability valuable to service providers are:
- It support multi-tenancy out of the box: This means the Service Provider will not have to acquire a separate hardware and setup an isolated vSphere environment per client, which end up improving the TCO and ROI for both the Service Provider and their customers.
- The vCenter/vSphere versions do not have to match between the service Provider and the Tenant. This is big as the service provider will have the liberty to board customers running a different version of vSphere and vCenter without having to impact the version they run on premise.
A question I am often asked lately when talking about VMware Cloud Availability is: Does the on premise environment of vSphere/vCenter have to match the versions used by the service provider and if not what versions are compatible? The short answer is no, for more info on the supported versions, look below.
Provider Versions
While vCD 8.20 and vSphere/vCenter 6.5 is recommended below is the different versions supported for the Service provider.
- vCD 8.10, 8.10.1 or 8.20
- vCenter 6.0u2+
- ESXi 6.0u2+
- Any NSX version certified by the vCD release selected above
Tenant Requirements
While vSphere/vCenter 6.0U2 and vSphere/vCenter 6.5 is the recommended versions for the Tenant, below is the full compatibility matrix and versions that can be used by the Tenant, which as you can see is pretty wide and goes all the way to vCenter 5.1 and ESXi 5.0.
| Feature | vCenter 6.5 | vCenter 6.0+ | vCenter 5.5u2 | vCenter 5.1 |
| ESXi versions | 6.5, 6.0, 5.5 | 6.0,5.5,5.1,5.0 | 5.5, 5.1, 5.0 | 5.1, 5.0 |
| VR versions | 6.5 | 6.1.x, 6.0.x | 5.8.x, 5.6.x | 5.8.x, 5.6.x |
| Failover | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Failover-test | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Failback | Automatic | Automatic | Manual | Manual |
| Snapshot supported | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| vRO Support | Yes | Yes | No | No |
I hope this post makes this info more visible and easier to find by Service Providers interested in VMware Cloud Availability. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comments area below.