With the latest release of vCloud Availability, some very cool features are added in it. In this post I will discuss about one such feature called “SLA Profiles”. 

What is SLA Profiles?

This new feature brings pre-configured protection profiles to be consumed as it is.

These profiles can be assigned to all/specific tenants and are available for tenants when creating new protection/migration for virtual machines.

Each SLA profile has following attributes:

• Target recovery point objective (RPO).
• Retention policy for the point in time instances (snapshots).
• Whether the quiescing is enabled.
• Whether the compression is enabled.
• Timeslot to delay the initial synchronization.

There are 3 SLA profiles that you will get out of the box i.e Gold, Silver & Bronze.

These profiles can be directly attached to specific organizations by clicking on Assign button.

Profile Management

SLA Profiles will be managed by the service provider. A providers can then set limits for some of the SLA attributes in a given profile and can use it in the form of policy and assign those policies to tenants so that every tenant protection fits in the policy limits.… Read More

In my last post of what’s new in vCAV 4.0 series, I discussed about SLA Profiles. In this post I will talk about another cool feature that tenants/providers are gonna get with 4.0.

vCAV 4.0 has ability to counts the traffic data transferred by each virtual machine that is replicating to cloud and aggregates the traffic volume information per organization. Service Provider can monitor the traffic for every replication bi-directionally and per organization individually.

How Traffic Monitoring Collection Works?

Below is high level workflow of how traffic monitoring mechanism work behind the scenes:

1: vCAV Replication Manager Service collects the traffic information for all replications to and from cloud sites and to and from on premises sites. The traffic information is aggregated by organization.

2: The cloud Replicator Service instance always collects the replication data traffic, for any replication direction. If a replication was configured with compress option, the  Replicator Service counts the compressed bytes.… Read More

Few days back I wrote a post on how to create Replication policies in vCloud Availability via GUI. In this post I will walk through steps of creating the same via API.

Below are high level steps of API workflow.

1: Get Auth Token

2: Create a New Replication Policy

Response Output: Make a note of the id of the policy from the response output.… Read More

Recently while working in lab, I came across situation where I had to remove the vCloud Availability 3.5 plugin from vCenter. To remove plugins from vCenter, we usually employ mob for this task, but removing the vCAV plugin follow different path. In this post I will walk through steps of doing the same.

Login to your vcsa appliance over SSH and execute following commands:

1: List vCAV plugin registrations in the vCenter Server Lookup service

Make a note of the Service ID from the output

2: Unregister vCAV plugin from the vCenter Lookup service, by providing the SSO credentials and using the Service Id fetched from  previous command.

3: Re run command from step 1 to verify vCAV plugin has been unregistered from lookup service. … Read More

In this post I will walk through steps of upgrading vCloud Availability deployment upgrade from version 3.0 to 3.5.

If you have missed earlier posts of this series, I would recommend reading them from below links:

1: vCAV 3.0-Provider Setup

2: vCAV 3.0-Replication Policies

3: vCAV 3.0-Tenant Setup

vCloud Availability upgrade can be performed via various methods (CLI & UI). These methods are very well documented Here 

Upgrading vCloud Availability in the Cloud

Before upgrading vCAV in service provider side, we need to ensure that environment is configured as per Pre-Upgrade requirement.

vCloud Availability Upgrade Sequence

For a multi site vCloud Availability deployment, upgrade the sites in the following order:

• Upgrade all vCloud Availability appliances in the local cloud site.
• Upgrade all vCloud Availability appliances in remote cloud sites.
• Upgrade all vCloud Availability On-Premises Appliance nodes.

In a vCloud Availability cloud site, upgrade all the appliances in following sequence:

• Upgrade the vCloud Availability Cloud Replication Management Appliance.

In first Part of vCAV 3.0 series, we learnt about service provider side configuration and in last Post we discussed about Replication Policies in vCAV. In this post I will walk through steps of configuring on-prem environment with vCAV. 

To configure on-prem environment to work with vCAV, you need to first download the vCAV 3.0 Appliance for Tenants which is located Here

Deployment of appliance is very straight forward like any other vmware product. Below slideshow shows the deployment steps.

Once the appliance boots up, make a note of the login url.

Login to vCAV on-prem appliance by typing https://<vcav-fqdn>/ui/admin

You will be prompted to change root password on first login.

Click Run initial setup wizard. 

On first page of wizard, specify the site name. When you pair the on-prem appliance with Cloud Site, your environment will be identified using this site name.

Enter vCenter lookup service details and sso credentials and hit Next.… Read More

In last post we learnt how to perform vCloud Availability 3.0 end to end configuration. But before we can jump into performing tenant side configuration, we need to configure Replication Policies.

Replication policies are sets of rules that define and control the replication attributes on a vCD organization level. Typically a replication policy enforces following attributes:

• Whether an organization can be used as a replication source.
• Whether an organization can be used as a replication destination.
• The minimum Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for an organization.
• The maximum number of retained snapshots per single virtual machine replication for an organization.
• The maximum number of virtual machine replications that can be created for an organization.

Note: A single replication policy can be assigned to multiple vCD organizations. 

Create a Replication Policy

You can edit and use the default replication policy that comes with vCAV or you can create a new one based on your requirements. … Read More

Recently I got chance to work on setting up vCloud Availability 3.x version in my test environment and it was a great learning curve. I will share my experience through series of blog posts so that it can help wider audience to understand every nuance’s of this wonderful product. 

I am not going to write any introduction post on what is vCAV and its architecture. Its very well documented Here

If you have worked on previous version of vCAV (2.0 & 1.5), you might remember it was a pain setting up various appliances. With vCAV 3.0, installation & configuration has been simplified drastically. No more hanky panky command line stuff. Now you just need 2 ova files for setting up cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

In this post I will cover cloud (service provider) side deployment & configuration steps.

Below screenshot shows steps of vCAV appliance deployment. 

Note: For lab deployment/POC we can use combined appliance deployment topology.… Read More