Since introducing the support for dedicated vSphere clouds as a replication destination, we have extended the list of available functionalities with every new release. VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 delivers several notable improvements:
- Recovery Plans
- Bandwidth throttling
- Public API
- Refinements to Recovery Settings
Recovery plans have been part of VMware Cloud Director Availability for a while but were available only for VMware Cloud Director cloud destinations. Now, they have become part of the vSphere DR and migration feature set and provide the same look and feel. A plan can be created for migrations or protections, but mixing them is not allowed.
By creating one, you define the order of how VMs will be migrated or failed over. In each step, you can include one or multiple VMs, add waiting time before the next step execution begins, or request a manual prompt that will suspend the plan until acknowledged. In terms of actions, you can test and perform a test cleanup afterward, along with the migration/failover operations.
Each generates a detailed execution report that contains site information, step and overall execution duration, and outcome.
Note: The recovery settings of all the replications that are part of the plan need to be configured before it is executed.
With this new feature, a global cap can be set for the inbound replication traffic received at a dedicated vSphere cloud from all peer sites. It does not impose any limits on the data and management traffic.
The limit is applied to a specific network interface of the Tunnel appliance and is specified in megabits per second.
Note: Even though external Replicator appliances are optional, to be able to enforce bandwidth throttling, the cloud site must run only external Replicators.
Another new feature in VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 is the vSphere DR and Migration public API which was not available in the previous releases. These APIs allow you to perform configuration, replication, backup, and many more operations.
The complete API reference and detailed documentation can be found at developer.vmware.com.
There are also some changes to the recovery settings, which are now being validated with the replication settings (datastore) to avoid errors during the failover/migration process due to misconfiguration. Also, the Network Mappings section allows configuring general mappings between source and destination networks, which is very convenient when you set the recovery settings of multiple replications at once. Of course, if needed, these mappings can be further customized per network adapter of each VM.
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