A series of announcements from the virtualization giant kicked off this year’s VMworld at Las Vegas. It turned out VMware Cloud Services, that has already been having a good run with its 4000+ cloud providers, is all set to receive many upgrades and some new additions.
And all of the upgrades targeted for the new “Multi-Cloud Opportunity” that the cloud providers are gearing up to capture.
Ever since the possibility of choosing an appropriate cloud which could be an on-premise setup or a public cloud for each application opened up, Cloud Providers have been waiting to hop on to the Multi-Cloud train.
While all that was happening, VMware has been moving in the direction of providing a unified platform for management for quite some time now. Even in its vSphere upgrade to version 6.7, we saw many integrations happening in vSphere Client to become a single platform for many operations.
Now it’s happening in VMware Cloud Services.
Whether it’s the new Cloud Provider Pod, vCloud Director 9.5, vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR or vCloud Usage Insight, all seem to be targeted to the same “single click automated deployment, simplified management, and reporting” theme VMware has been following.
Let’s take vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR for now.
This asynchronous replication and failover solution for Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service has been around for less than a year. But it has gotten great results if we are to go by their stats. The time spent in man-hours by the cloud providers in identifying the cause of replication failures on their SAN-based replication solution has been reduced by 72%. This saves them an annual Operational cost of 15-20,000 dollars per customer.
This Cloud-to-Cloud solution allows the Cloud Providers to run workloads on vCloud Director. This allows them to offer a cloud-to-cloud disaster-recovery-as-a-service for different org vDCs that are on the same or to a different vCloud Director instance.
This, along with the other upgrades we are about to see, the Cloud Providers can now effectively monetize their existing vCloud Director multi-tenant environments with added Managed-Service-Opportunities.
Upgrades:
DR through the upgraded UI
Cloud Provider Partners can provide disaster recovery from the vCloud Director UI. For tenants, DR is just an option in the toolbar that is disabled by default. By enabling this, they can see DR in their vCloud Director UI. There is a separate UI that can be accessed from anywhere for the Cloud Providers that are using earlier versions, that comes with the same functionalities.
Aligned with the Swagger framework, you can authenticate and manage sessions on Replication Manager perform other Replication workflows like Create & Delete, Failover & Failback, Pause & Resume, Configure initial settings like Register Tunnel, DNS, stc.
Stability and Usability improvements
When the previous version, vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud 1.0, is considered, the usability quotient and the ability to enforce controls was something that took a hit. But this time, VMware has turned things around with Policy Controls for Cloud Providers, who could now tier their offerings to the Tenant organizations by specifying the minimum RPO for each Tenant Org.
From vSphere 6.5, support for the lowest RPO of 5 minutes has also been available.
Other policy controls include specifying the maximum number of snapshots per Org or number of replications per tenant to avoid storage over-utilization. You can now apply a filter for replication actions on multiple, single & groups. Workflow execution speeds up.
It Scales!
When concerning Multi-Tenant cloud environments, it’s a no-brainer that scalability is something Cloud Providers will look for. Will the cloud director scale with the increase in volume demand? In 1.5, it does.
From being able to 30 active replication in tenants in the previous version to now going up to 100 according to their testing and validations, 1.5 has improved on many fronts. From their testing, it is revealed that up to 120 concurrent operations could be handled while 7 active vCloud Availability Replicator instances per vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud instance and much more.
Workflows with vRealize Orchestrator
Orchestrating actions after a disaster has a great impact on recovery time. With the exposed UI in 1.5, you can now create workflows and runbooks with vRealize Orchestrator that will help in inventory tasks and data collection from instances.
This also helps in monitoring health, capacity, violations that could’ve occurred, inventory and threshold alarms. Managed Service Reporting will be an added opportunity for the providers to deliver better service.
From what we’ve seen so far, we can be confident that VMware’s competitors can also follow suite with the Cloud Partner Program. This transition from an on-premise data center virtualization software to Cloud Services and going beyond the cloud to networking seems to prove what CEO of VMware had put – “Networking revenue will rival or beat virtualization”.
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