VMware Cloud Director, our multi-cloud and multi-tenant cloud provider platform, has delivered a lot of new capabilities to our cloud providers over the past year. With VMware Explore Europe now upon us, let’s take a closer look at some of the newest capabilities available and coming to Cloud Director, and how they continue to improve the service capabilities cloud providers can offer to their tenants to build cloud smart solutions.
Get Cloud Smart with support for Azure VMware Solution
VMware Cloud Director service already enables cloud providers to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS and Google Cloud VMware Engine in a multi-tenant environment. VMware Cloud Director service now has added support for Azure VMware Solution.
Cloud Director service on Azure VMware Solution
VMware Cloud Director service now can manage Enterprise Multi-Tenancy SDDC endpoints on Azure VMware Solution (AVS) as an Initial Availability offering. As originally announced in August, Azure VMware Solution is an existing Microsoft service, sold and supported by Microsoft, and verified by VMware, that runs on Azure hardware in Azure data centers, while Cloud Director service is sold and offered as a SaaS service operated by VMware, to VMware Cloud Providers and Enterprise customers.
An Enterprise customer can abstract resources from the physical nodes SDDC and create logical multi-tenancy of their resources within the organization, creating a public cloud consumption experience for their lines of business.
With this latest release, Cloud Director service now covers all the major hyperscalers, providing a global multi-cloud multi-tenant control plane for infrastructure and applications.
VMware Cloud Director Service delivers a unified multi-cloud management experience
Cloud Director support for vSphere 8
Cloud Director continues to keep up with the latest innovation from VMware vSphere including unified management for AI/ML Hardware Accelerators with Device Groups, support for latency sensitivity applications with High Latency Sensitivity with Hyper-threading and improvements in DRS performance.
Complimenting the NVIDIA vGPU support that is already available in Cloud Director, Device Groups make Virtual Machines consuming complementary hardware devices simpler in vSphere 8. Compatible NVIDIA device drivers are required and subject to NVIDIA release. Device groups can be composed of two or more NVIDIA hardware devices that share a common PCIe switch or devices that share a direct interconnect between each other. Device groups are discovered at the hardware layer and presented to vSphere as a single unit that represents the group, these are then available in Cloud Director in the vGPU policies. vSphere DRS and vSphere HA are aware of device groups and will place VMs appropriately to satisfy the device group as well as satisfy any Cloud Director vGPU policy that is associated with a Device Group.
Emerging applications that are latency sensitive is critical for a lot of mission-critical solutions. For example, Telco workloads require increased support for latency-sensitive applications. High Latency Sensitivity with Hyper-threading is designed to support these workloads and deliver improved performance. Using vSphere 8 a virtual machine’s vCPU are scheduled on the same hyper-threaded physical CPU core, therefore reducing latency for critical applications, this functionality is seamlessly passed onto Cloud Director managed workloads.
Another key feature for Cloud providers is DRS. DRS has been used extensively by Cloud Providers to ensure that workloads get the resources they need, critical for Service Levels attributed to cloud computing. In vSphere 8, DRS performance can be significantly improved by leveraging memory statistics, resulting in optimal placement decisions for VMs without affecting performance and resource consumption resulting in better hardware utilization and cloud economics for Cloud Providers.
Developer services are complimented in vSphere 8 with the new consolidated Tanzu Kubernetes runtime, which is available in VMware Cloud Director through the updated Container Service Extension plugin. This brings improved workload resilience with Availability zones and simpler, repeatable installations with Cluster Class configurations. Other improvements are documented in the Container service extension update previously and inherit much of the vSphere 8 capability to deliver a multi-node control plane for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters.
Read this blog post to learn more about capabilities in vSphere 8 that cloud providers can take advantage of and monetize.
VMware Data Solutions for Scalable Data Management
VMware Data Solutions (formerly Tanzu Data Services) are also coming to sovereign clouds. This portfolio of data messaging, database, and caching solutions will help our cloud providers build scalable, compliant and conformant data management solutions for highly regulated and sensitive industries. By leveraging the capabilities of these data services in conjunction with VMware Cloud Director for multi-tenant environments, cloud providers can help customer development teams improve performance, expand their application service capabilities, and deepen their data insights across their enterprise customers. Tenants will have access to a self-service UI and API for lifecycle management of these services provided by cloud providers so they can tune their instances for optimal performance of their applications
For this initial cloud announcement, VMware RabbitMQ is supported and globally available and VMware SQL is available as preview with additional VMware Data Solutions services to come in 2023. For more about the VMware Data Solutions for VMware cloud providers, you can read our blog from earlier this summer for additional details.
Simplifying Cloud Deployments with VMware Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager
The evolution of the Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager continues with great feedback from our cloud partners. Version 1.4 of Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager brings UI enhancements and now includes improved automation and management of additional VMware Cloud Provider solutions. Cloud Providers can now carry out tasks such as deployment and upgrade of products at scale directly and concurrently through the new GUI. This helps simplify and automate the Day 1 and Day 2 tasks for the Provider eliminating the chance of human error and ensuring adherence to the VMware Validated Solution framework. We also have improved task execution capabilities with extended interop product support that helps troubleshooting and makes upgrades to new versions simpler.
Easing ISV service onboarding for Cloud Director
Previously to this update, ISV and Technical Alliance Partners (TAP) had to wait for BETA and then deploy and test in their environments against the latest Cloud Director codebase. Now with integration to the VMware Integration Validation service (VIVa) and the VMware Learning platform, Cloud Director labs will be available to ISV and TAP partners to access the labs quickly, deploy their software, integrate, and test their code against the latest Cloud Director versions pre-GA and ensure that their software is compatible with the latest code and APIs. This will help Cloud Providers who use and rely on ecosystem solutions integrated with Cloud Director avoid the long wait periods of catch-up from the ecosystem vendors, to be able to upgrade to the latest version of Cloud Director knowing that the ecosystem solutions support the latest versions.
VMware Cloud Director Availability for Sovereign Clouds
Sovereign Clouds can now benefit from VMware Cloud Director Availability, which provides VM-level replication, including VM storage & network settings, support for warm migrations with L2 stretch network functionality, and DR Plans, with SLA policies on the roadmap for early 2023. This supports private cloud and dedicated clouds, and supports VCD org structures in multi-tenancy environments.
Additional Resources for Cloud Providers
Below is a list of upcoming sessions at VMware Explore Barcelona, as well as available assets which can help provide more detail on partner solutions available for our cloud providers. In addition, stop by the Sovereign Cloud and Tanzu booths at the VMware Pavilion to learn more about the solutions and talk to experts about how VMware can help you plan and build cloud smart services that meet your tenant requirements, whether in public, private, or sovereign clouds.
VMware Explore Barcelona Sessions
Blogs
Solution Briefs
Videos
