Table of Contents
- Networking and Load balancing
- Simplified NSX ALB licensing
- Static routes
- Converged virtual services and ports
- Operations
- Cosmetic changes
- API Tokens creation
- Terraform support for CSE
- Under-the-hood Improvements
- Cross vCenter Server vApp Instantiation Utilizing Shared Storage
- SDRS placement improvements
- Photon OS 3.0
- Wrap up
As you know, all VMware backed SDDCs run the core stack with vCenter Server and vSphere ESXi at the very least. Some customers who need to extend the capabilities to the network and storage will also deploy VMware VSAN for distributed storage and VMware NSX-T for virtualized networking. A growing chunk of customers now run VMware’s SDS and SDN solutions in their environments as it brings value through extended features and streamlined operations.
On top of these products that plug into the VMware core stack, organizations that need to offer VMware resources with a self-service portal to internal or external customers need a way to do so in a managed fashion. VMware Cloud Director (formerly known as vCloud Director) is a VMware solution that allows organizations to create on-premise private or public clouds.
I won’t go through describing what VMware Cloud Director is as we already have a blog about this. Granted it is now outdated and a lot has changed in the product since then but the wider concepts still translate. The major change isn’t actually technical but in the way, the product is distributed. VMware Cloud Director can only be purchased through the VCPP program, i.e. VMware Cloud Providers. If your organization is registered, you can get the VMware Cloud Verified logo and be referenced in the VMware marketplace for customers to find your offering.
Networking and Load balancing
One of the selling points of VMware Cloud Director compared to a regular VMware environment is the network integration with VMware NSX-T for networking and NSX ALB for load balancing. No need to skip through several admin consoles as you can do everything from within the VCD portal. This is especially true for solutions that leverage the whole stack like deploying Kubernetes clusters using cluster API. Deploying to vSphere (CAPV) can prove tricky and very much environment specific as vSphere doesn’t include any sort of load balancing solution so you have to figure that out yourself. However, deploying to VMware Cloud Director (CAPVCD) is a lot more streamlined as the creation of load balancers can be done automatically through the VCD API.
Simplified NSX ALB licensing
One of the gripes cloud providers had with NSX Advanced Load Balancer was the cost of the Enterprise license. Being so expensive, many providers opted for the Basic tier and couldn’t offer advanced features to customers that wanted them, making finding a cloud provider a tricky affair for them. In order to address this issue, VMware changed the licensing model and all ALB controllers are now licensed as Enterprise. Cloud Providers can now restrict a tenant to the NSX ALB basic licensing feature set (now called “Standard”) or allow them access to the full Enterprise feature set (now called “Premium”) in the portal settings. Although I am not a fan of the constant name changes in products and licenses, this move makes a lot of sense as it should be down to the tenants to pay for the feature set they use instead of forcing the price of the higher tier to every single tenant.
Static routes
Granted this change isn’t as ground breaking and may sound a bit odd given how basic this is but up until now, only dynamic routing protocols were available, VCD 10.4 offers tenants the option to configure static routes and define the next hop on the Edge gateway.
Converged virtual services and ports
In NSX ALB, a virtual service can be thought of as the data plane of a load balancer. It listens on an IP and port and load balances to a pool of backend servers. Up until now, the NSX ALB integration in VMware Cloud Director was restrictive in the creation of virtual service. In VCD 10.4 you can created a virtual service with multiple ports and even create multiple virtual services on a same virtual IP (VIP) with different backend pools.
Operations
Other small things have been added which will help administrators keep track of their resources and what’s happening in the environment.
Cosmetic changes
I called this section as such because there is no change in behavior or added feature. However, tenants now have better feedback on catalog synchronization. Instead of being in the dark as to what’s going on, the user can now see what is happening in the background in terms of file sync operations.
A nice addition also includes the IOPS setting in storage policies to help administrators make informed decisions when provisioning storage. Whatever is configured in vCenter will also be displayed in VMware Cloud Director 10.4.
Talking about IOPS, Cloud providers can also decide to show or hide the IOPS limits and reservations on VM disks and named disks from tenants by using the new View Disk IOPS permission. Note that you cannot edit IOPS reservations and limits from within VMware Cloud Director though.
API Tokens creation
VMware Cloud Director 10.3 introduced the long-awaited API token to facilitate programmatic connections to the VCD API and improve automation by using refresh tokens instead of username/password combinations. In this version, a user would create an API token and any operation initiated using it would be executed as that user. VCD 10.4 introduces the service account feature. Service account users are like regular users except they cannot perform certain tasks and have only View rights for some resources, such as users, groups, roles, and rights. Their purpose is to provide traceability of API calls.
Terraform support for CSE
On the automation front, VMware Cloud Director 10.4 supports Terraform 3.7 which can completely automate the CSE (Container Service Extension) environment set up with a single click. This will greatly simplify and speed up deployment times for cloud providers that offers Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS).
Under-the-hood Improvements
VMware Cloud Director 10.4 also comes with several interesting core changes in the product.
Cross vCenter Server vApp Instantiation Utilizing Shared Storage
VCD 10.4 lets you instantiate vApp templates across organizations backed by different vCenter Servers. Using NFS shared storage between said vCenters will cut the OVA Export and Import operation triggered when instantiating a vApp from a catalog backed by a VDC in another vCenter. When vCenter Server A and B have a shared datastore with templates residing there, VCD 10.4 will perform fast vApp instantiation to any destination datastore in vCenter Server B.
SDRS placement improvements
VMware Cloud Director 10.4 tightens its integration with SDRS to better place a VM on a SDRS enabled cluster. The datastore free space is better assessed which will offer more optimized storage utilization and faster placement selection.
Photon OS 3.0
The VMware Cloud Director 10.4 virtual appliance now runs Photon OS 3.0. This upgraded OS version includes critical library updates, a unified console proxy for both HTTP and VM console possible, and Trusted Platform Module Support… See the release notes for more details.
Wrap up
VMware Cloud Director 10.4 addresses a number of requests from service providers and gives them more options and flexibility to better distribute and sell resources to their customers. The NSX ALB is, in my opinion, a smart and awaited change as it will open a lot of business opportunities along with simplifying cloud providers operations and offerings. On top of that; the added support for virtual services ports and pools will greatly benefit third party products that provision resources which need external access without having to mess around with tons of dnat rules and load balancers.
Related Posts
10 Points Worth Considering Before Installing VMware vCloud Director
vCloud Director – An Overview
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