VMware has announced the general availability of VMware vCloud Director 5.6 the first release designed exclusively for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers.
The update to vCloud Director will provide access to new enhancements used in VMware vCloud Air (formerly VMware vCloud Hybrid Service). With vCloud Director 5.6, service providers can build differentiated hybrid cloud services that are the best fit for enterprise organisations.
“We continue to actively engage with our service provider partners, and are pleased to offer these enhancements to VMware vCloud Director,” says Geoff Waters, vice-president, Service Provider channel, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware.
“With VMware vCloud Director 5.6, we are providing the tools to VMware vCloud Air Network service providers to continue to offer customers flexibility and choice of cloud platforms on a local basis.”
VMware vCloud Director orchestrates the provisioning of software-defined data centre services, enabling service providers to deliver complete virtual data centres for easy consumption in minutes. As a result, service providers and their customers are able to move on-premises workloads to the cloud quickly, seamlessly and with confidence. VMware vCloud Director is also a foundational component of vCloud Air, the platform for cloud services delivered by VMware.
New enhancements to vCloud Director 5.6 include:
* VM Disk Level Storage Profiles – allows a single virtual machine (VM) to access different tiers of storage such as storage area network (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), and local storage to help balance storage cost versus storage performance. VMware vCloud Director 5.6 also supports VMware Virtual SAN.
* VMware NSX Support – provides customers with simple, secure software-defined networking using the NSX network virtualisation platform, in addition to the current VMware vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) support.
* VM Monitoring Service – provides visibility into current and historical VM performance metrics at an individual tenant level. Tenants can use this new capability to troubleshoot application performance issues, auto-scale their applications and perform capacity planning.
* Updated Software Development Kits (SDKs) to the vCloud API – new set of Java, PHP, and .NET SDKs with documentation and samples available.
* Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Ecosystem User Interface (UI) – provides ISVs with a platform that allows them access to underlying vCloud Director capabilities through application programming interfaces (APIs).
These APIs enable ISVs to build multiple, highly flexible UI based cloud-related services, such as VM monitoring, catalogues and vApps, on top of vCloud Director 5.6 that can be leveraged by service providers. All new functionalities within vCloud Director 5.6 are only available through APIs.