VMware Cloud Director 10.1 has just been released and ready for you to try! As we have got used to in the past few releases of vCloud Director, the amount of features added in each new release is substantial even in minor releases. VMware Cloud Director 10.1 is no different and comes with plenty of features than our Cloud Providers will be thrilled with.

As a start, you might have noticed the name change. vCloud Director has gone under a huge rebranding and is now called VMware Cloud Director, as our Cloud Director Service across the hyperscalers is on its way as well. While some of our documentations might take some time to get updated and where you might still find some old references on the web of it being called vCloud Director, going forward it will be named VMware Cloud Director. Please welcome “VMware Cloud Director”, as it brought a huge amount of features with it.

App Launchpad

Many of our Cloud Providers had often asked about adding applications market place to our Cloud Director Portal in the past. Now with App Launchpad they get a very modern looking market place within the Cloud Director portal, where they can publish applications from different sources including Bitnami Community Catalog VM images, ISV apps, and even in-house developed applications.

App Launchpad will be offered as a free component for VMware Cloud Director, and does not mandate the use of Bitnami (Although it is a great way of getting access to over 300 open source applications with support), so what are you waiting for! Try it out and start offering aPaaS to your customers today. Here are few more teasers of App Launchpad

Container Service Extension (CSE) 2.6

Offering more developer ready services is key to addressing this new persona’s needs and VMware Cloud Director is pushing limits with our new developer ready portfolio. CSE is the main interface to either native K8 Kubernetes Clusters or PKS Kubernetes Clusters for VMware Cloud Director. We have added some highly requested capabilities in CSE 2.6 including a nice UI instead of being command line only and in-place upgrade of K8s. I have already created a post on CSE 2.6 while in beta documenting all of it’s new features including some screenshots where you can find it at: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/k8s/vcloud-director-container-service-extension-2-6-beta-is-here.html

Tenant App 2.4

vROPs Tenant App has been providing performance monitoring, metering, and chargeback at Cloud providers and presents it in a multi-tenant fashion to their tenants. There have been quite a few enhancements to the Tenant App in 2.4 which is expected to be released on 16th of April including:

• The capability of scheduling and exporting for bills
• Closer integration with NSX data collection, more network metrics, 95th percentile billing for network bandwidth, and sizing profile-based metering.
• New pricing and billing capability are provided in conditional rate factors for selective discounts and premiums.
• One time fixed costs for initialization costs
• Configurable volume discounts and conditional policy over-rides for special VMs

Encryption as a service

Cloud Director 10.1 has introduced support for vSphere Encryption, which will allow our Cloud Providers to offer VMs encryption to their customers. I have got a request for this often from our Cloud Providers in the past, and happy to see it included in 10.1

NSX-T Integration Improvements

As NSX-T has been adding features over the past few quarters, the VMware Cloud Director team has been adding more and more integration points with NSX-T. We are getting much closer to NSX-V integration parity. Below is the highlight of new features now integrated into VMware Cloud Director

• Improved IPSec VPN configuration process. IPSec is no longer a multi-screen setup process and further certificate management manual tasks, now IPSec Service will automatically be created if IPSec is enabled on a specific Edge.
• Security Groups, security enhancements are delivered in security groups where subnets can now be grouped for easy configuration.
• In order to make networks within the tenant vdc become directly addressable from either a branch office or corporate datacenter there is typically MPLS configuration and the need for a fully routed networking topology. Now the T0 router associated with the external network can advertise routes connected to a tenant’s edge gateway by the T0 being part of the tenant networking stack and the provider dedicating a specific external network to a specific Edge Gateway. BGP configuration can now be applied to the T0 uplink so external networks can be backed by a T0-VRF.
• Further, a migration tool from NSX-V to NSX-T when used in connection with Cloud Director had been introduced. Please note this is a different migration tool than the original NSX-V to NSX-T migration tool and you should use the one specific to Cloud Director if planning such a migration in a Cloud Director environment.

Additional Cloud Director Enhancements

• Terraform VMware Cloud Director Provider 2.7 has been released which includes quite a bit of enhancement and further integrations.
• Object Storage Extension (OSE) 1.5, which has added enhancement to the Object Storage Extension for Cloud Director as well now supports Dell ECS next to Cloudian.
• Cloud Director Appliance enhancements, especially when it comes to database high availability where automated failover of the database is added.

At last for more details on features and enhancements that were added in VMware Cloud Director 10.1, you can check out the following white paper: What’s New with VMware Cloud Director 10.1