vCloud Availability for vCloud Director-Part-1-Introduction

What is vCloud Availability for vCloud Director (VCAV) ?

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution that provides simple and secure asynchronous replication and failover for vSphere managed workloads.

VMware released vCloud Availability for vCloud Director keeping in mind to provide cloud innovations to vCloud Air Network partners so that they can implement this software solution to provide Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to customers.

Customer’s who are using vCloud Air, knows that vCloud Air uses vSphere Replication to provide the DRaaS service to their customers. This is a very similar solution which vCAN partners will now be using for DRaaS. 

Since vCloud Air is not present in all regions,  vCloud Availability will be a blessing for vSphere customers because they can now buy and use DRaaS service from a local partner.

In last 3-4 years there is a shift in technology as more and more customer are now adopting to cloud solutions. Many Customers are no longer interested in setting up a redundant datacenter as per their BCDR policies. These days service providers are providing a very cost-effective DR solution which is very easy to configure and manage.

vCloud Availability key features and benefits?

Benefits which service providers will be getting out of vCloud Availability solution is very similar to what vCloud Air is currently providing under their DRaaS service. Main benefits of vCloud Availability can be listed down as below:

  • Self-service protection, failover and failback workflows per VM.
  • Recovery point objective (RPO) support from 15 minutes to 24 hours.
  • Pre-seeding for monstrous vm’s.
  • Integrates with existing vSphere environments:
  • Tenant UI integrated in vCenter
  • Multiple point in instance support with up to 24 restore points.
  • Replication traffic totally secured by built-in encryption.
  • API support for automation.
  • Support for Multi-Tenancy on service provider’s side.

vCloud Availability requirements

Current version of vCAV is 2.0 and to check interoperability between VCAV 2.0 and other VMware solutions or third party software please read this article and follow VMware Product Interop Matrices website. 

In general to use vCloud Availability for DRaaS, the cloud provider should have following running in their datacenter:

  • vCloud Director 8.10 or higher
  • vSpehre 6.0 U2 (Esxi 6.0 U2 and vCenter 6.0 U2)
  • NSX 6.2.3
  • vSphere Replication 6.0 or later

On-prem requirements for customer:

  • vCenter Server 6.0 or above
  • vSphere Replication appliance 6.0
  • VMware ESXi Host 5.5.x, or 6.0
  •  DR-VDC Subscription in Service provider side.
  • Internet connection between customer’s on-premises environment and the vCloud Air Network service provider.

In next post of series we will discuss more on the logical architecture and how a service provider can deploy and configure vCloud Availability for providing DRaaS to their customers.

Additional References:

To know more about this product, feel free to read below articles.

VMware vCloud Availability

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director FAQ

VCAV Documentation Center

Video Tutorials

1: VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director Product Overview

2: VMware vCloud Availability Configuration

3: Replication from On-Premises to Cloud

4: Failover, reversing the replication, and fail back

5: Replicate from Cloud to Tenant

6: Migrate a Virtual Machine to the Cloud

I hope you find this post informational. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable 🙂

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