vCloud Director 9.0 Released

Manish Jha

Yesterday VMware released vCloud Director 9.0 and this version of vCD brings many new things on table which customer’s were looking for some time. We will discuss about Whats new with this release. Vcloud Director 9.0 was first anoounced by VMware in VMworld 2017 on 28/08/2017.

The GA version of vCloud Director 9.0 is build 6681978 and is available for download for service providers from here

Whats new with this release?

Below new features are in this release:

  • New HTML5 based UI which is fast (same like HTML client for vSphere). However, the old Flex based UI is still available.
  • New VM lifecycle workflows: VM creation task is now completed in one screen as opposed to maximum of seven in previous releases of vCD.
  • Multisite management:  If a tenant has workloads running across different Org vDC’s and in more than once vCloud Director instance, then tenant can access all of them via single portal.
  • vCloud Director Extender: It offers migrations between Cloud, an extension of L2 where NSX is not required in local environments. This means that customers with a simple vCenter will be able to connect to resources offered by vCloud Director providers and move workloads there. You can read more about vCloud Extender form here
  • Support for PostgreSQL: Postgres v 9.5 is now included as supported database. Earlier only MSSQL and Oracle was supported. If you want to migrate from MSSQL or Orcale DB to Postgres, then you can do so via cell Management Tool utility (I am pretty excited to test this in lab today)
  • Support for vSAN and VVol (Customers were looking for both of these for quiet some time)
  • Application Extensibility for the UI to allow 3rd party plugins is a significant new feature and will allow vendors to tap into vCD even more to enhance the client experience.
  • Trunking support for External and Routed Org Networks.
  • Up to 100 milliseconds latency between vCenter Server and vCloud Director is supported.
  • VM metrics available in UI: Earlier the VM metrics were accessible only via API and that too required routing metrics data from vCD to cassandra database. With vCD 9.0 metrics data is now part of the new HTML5 Tenant UI.

Useful links:

Video Tutorials

vCloud Director 9.0 HTML 5 Tenant Portal

vCloud Director 9.0 Metrics Dashboard Demo

Note:  vCloud Director 9.0 is exclusively available to Service Providers that are enrolled in the vCloud Air Network (vCAN) program.

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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