VMware Cloud Director 10.6 is now GA

As we embark on the latest iteration of the Broadcom Benefit Partner Program, featuring multiple cloud companies options, VMware by Broadcom is delighted to announce that VMware Cloud Director 10.6 is now available as part of the VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) portfolio, commencing June 27th, 2024. This inaugural launch introduces groundbreaking features and upgrades that have the potential to transform your private and public cloud management capabilities?

Ours is a singular focus on multi-tier tenancy, yielding innovative features and refinements that grant unparalleled adaptability, expandability, and oversight, empowering your organization with unprecedented agility. Whether seeking to optimize cloud operations or boost performance, VMware Cloud Director 10.6 offers the necessary tools.

Discover significant upgrades and innovative features in these key domains:

Three-Tier Tenancy

VMware Cloud Director enables service providers to define a multi-tenant architecture via its intuitive user interface, known as the three-tier tenancy model, which allows for the creation of sub-service provider organisations with limited administrative permissions over specific sets of customers.

Cloud providers can enable controlled access to specific resources and organizations within their infrastructure, thereby ensuring each tenant has secure access only to the resources they require. The advanced tenant model also enables greater scalability, flexibility, and security, as cloud providers can easily manage and provision resources across multiple tiers of management.

This progressive strategy enables cloud providers to adopt various business models, including:

Within large-scale enterprises, establishing sub-provider organisations enables the creation of self-contained administrative structures for distinct departments or subsidiaries, fostering a sense of independence while remaining firmly within the parent entity’s fold.
Partner with cloud companies to resell cloud solutions through a network of authorized providers and managed services suppliers.

The latest launch of VMware Cloud Director introduces comprehensive three-tier tenancy capabilities across all asset and company types, effectively positioning the solution as an ideal choice for cloud providers seeking to offer flexible and scalable cloud services to customers.

Scale Limits

This launch brings significant enhancements on multiple fronts of the platform, including:

VMware Cloud Director now supports up to 55,000 virtual machines (VMs) per instance, regardless of power state.
The number of concurrent distant consoles supported has been increased to 22,000.
The platform now supports an unprecedented 300,000 diverse customers.
The organisational framework for aggregating Digital Knowledge Centre collections has been restructured into a three-layered architecture, adopting a novel approach to categorisation. With the introduction of this new design, sub-suppliers are empowered to manage knowledge heart teams that can support up to 2,000 members (previously capped at 16), allowing for enhanced collaboration and resource sharing across these groups.

Snapshots of Virtual Machines (VMs) and vApps provide a means of capturing the current state of these entities for later recall or reuse.

VMware Cloud Director now offers increased flexibility for virtual machines and vApps, allowing multiple snapshots to be taken per VM or per vApp, up to a maximum limit defined by the cloud provider.

VMware Cloud Director offers a more environmentally sustainable and flexible approach to managing digital machines by supporting multiple snapshots, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and trust in the cloud infrastructure.

Content material Hub

Streamline the management of containerized workloads and resources across the cluster by leveraging the upgraded Content Hub capabilities.

Kubernetes cluster administrators can now define precise entry controls, allowing specific individual users or teams to be granted tailored permissions to access distinct clusters, namespaces, or resources. This feature enables a multi-tenancy architecture, allowing multiple organizations to safely coexist within the same Kubernetes environment, each with its dedicated isolated namespace for deploying, managing, and governing their containerized applications.

The new Content Material Hub Operator model has been released, running natively within a Kubernetes cluster to leverage high-performance communication with VMware Cloud Director via the WebSocket protocol. The operator provides real-time compatibility reports directly to the Tenant Portal, empowering cluster owners to make informed decisions regarding upgrades and ensuring a seamless integration with VMware Cloud Director.

Distributed World Catalog

Enable global, multi-tenant access to a unified catalog across multiple VMware Cloud Director (VCD) sites, providing a seamless and consistent experience for users regardless of the underlying vCenter instance or Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) infrastructure. Utilize platform-independent, scalable storage solutions akin to those offered by NetApp, Dell, and VMware’s vSAN, ensuring seamless data replication and uniformity across the entire catalog.

Numerous IDP protocols and native clients exist to facilitate seamless interactions between diverse systems.

VMware Cloud Director allows organizations to leverage multiple identity provider protocols, including LDAP, SAML, and OpenID Connect (OIDC), to create a comprehensive authentication strategy. By partnering with external ID suppliers, you can capitalize on the latest advancements in authentication technology. Notwithstanding support for native customers remains available at launch, their utilization in production environments is being deprecated, with continued full support extending until the next major release of VMware Cloud Director.

Improved VM Template instantiation efficiency

During provisioning of a VM template on a unique vCenter using VMware Cloud Director, the system adopts a dual-faceted approach to ensure environmentally sustainable deployment. By leveraging the velocity and effectiveness of cloning a VM template directly, the initial approach attempts to accelerate the process. This strategy enables rapid creation of a novel virtual machine instance, obviating the need for the time-consuming process of exporting and importing the VM as an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) file. Despite the possibility of encountering any issues or errors during the cloning process, the system will seamlessly transition to an alternative method, utilizing OVF export and import mechanisms to successfully deploy the virtual machine. This fallback strategy guarantees efficient provisioning processes, regardless of whether cloning is feasible or not.

Enhanced Encryption Administration

VMware Cloud Director 10.6 delivers significant advancements in encryption management capabilities, offering administrators greater control and flexibility over their organization’s sensitive data.

Concurrently registering multiple key suppliers enables greater flexibility and scalability.
Throughout the publication process for key suppliers, the cluster ID can be edited, enabling service providers to easily determine which key supplier corresponds to each tenant.
Now, when authenticating a key supplier or registering a brand-new key, customers can choose to generate a fresh key for each encryption operation, thereby ensuring an additional layer of security.
A groundbreaking innovation in encryption technology has emerged with the unveiling of a cutting-edge key rotation function that seamlessly integrates automation capabilities, liberating users from tedious manual processes by relying on customizable configuration settings to drive this pivotal security measure. This course of action is non-disruptive, guaranteeing a seamless encryption process.
VMware Cloud Director 10.6 now enables organizations to leverage distinct encryption strategies for varying storage configurations, fostering greater adaptability and tailoring of their encryption approaches to suit unique needs.
VMware Cloud Director 10.6 introduces the option to ‘Don’t re-encrypt’ previously encrypted data when deleting an encryption coverage.

vSAN 4.1 NFS Assist

VMware Cloud Director 10.6 has been enhanced to include support for vSAN 4.1 NFS, allowing for secure file sharing capabilities with Kerberos-based authentication. This integration enables reliable and secure vSAN 4.1 usage as a storage solution, providing an additional option for file sharing within your organization?

Resolving CVE-2024-22272 Vulnerability

To learn more about this vulnerability’s impact on VMware products from Broadcom, visit.

Can IPv6 assist for VMware Cloud Director equipment nodes provide seamless connectivity to IPv6-enabled workloads and services on premises?

To achieve this, you must configure the following components: virtual network (VNet), network interface cards (NICs), and network policies. The VNet acts as a bridge between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds, allowing communication between them.

In a VMware Cloud Director environment, you can set up an IPv6-enabled VNet by creating a new one with an IPv6 CIDR block. Then, configure the NICs on your equipment nodes to use this VNet and enable IPv6 forwarding.

To provide seamless connectivity, create network policies that allow IPv6 traffic flow between the IPv4 and IPv6 networks. This can be done by setting up static routes and allowing traffic from specific IPv6 subnets.

Furthermore, you must also ensure that the VMware Cloud Director software and any other dependent services support IPv6.

VMware Cloud Director streamlines the setup of equipment cells within IPv6 networks, empowering users to harness the benefits of this modern networking protocol while ensuring seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

Customized Well being Monitor

We’re enhancing our commitment to employee well-being by introducing tailored health dashboards that integrate seamlessly with our existing HTTP protocols. Tenants can now proactively monitor and troubleshoot a range of key performance indicators for their load-balanced applications, including crucial metrics such as response time, packet loss rates, and connection error frequencies. This empowers them to proactively address service reliability and responsiveness, ensuring seamless operations.

Avi Load Balancer Logging

With the introduction of tenant-level Avi Load Balancer (LB) logging capabilities, tenants and cloud providers can gain a more profound insight into the usage of their Avi LB resources. The function provides fine-grained visibility into Avi Load Balancer exercises, allowing users to track usage patterns, identify priority issues, and export log files for auditing, compliance, and regulatory purposes.

Avi LB WAF

By integrating Avi LB with Cloud Director, we unlock innovative opportunities for our customers to deliver customized solutions to their end-users. By incorporating Web Application Firewall (WAF) safety measures into their service offering, they will proactively provide elevated security against web-based threats, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction and solidifying their market position.

With the advent of Web Application Firewalls (WAF), several advantages have emerged.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) effectively thwart online attacks, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), by scrutinizing incoming traffic and prohibiting suspicious requests from reaching your website’s underlying infrastructure.
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) enable organisations to comply with regulatory requirements by providing real-time visibility into internet traffic, thereby enabling the blocking of malicious requests or specific types of traffic that pose a threat.
By offering Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) as a value-added service, companies can demonstrate their commitment to safeguarding customer data and build trust with potential clients.
While Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are often a crucial distinguishing factor for companies vying to make their mark in a competitive landscape, it’s worth noting that they offer an additional layer of protection and security.

IP Deal with Administration

Significant enhancements have been introduced to the IP Deal with Administration, focusing on streamlining IP reservation processes for workloads and assigning static IP addresses to enduring entities, akin to those used by load balancers. Enhancements are engineered to harmonize with a three-tier permission framework, providing an intuitive experience for navigating intellectual property lifecycle management, which originates from IP pools tailored for tenant, sub-provider, and supplier profiles.

IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN) configurations are applied to supplier gateways and edge gateways to securely connect remote sites and data centers over the internet or a private WAN.

This setup provides confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity for all data transmitted between these locations. The main benefits include improved security, reduced risk of unauthorized access, and enhanced overall network reliability.

To achieve this level of security, IPsec VPNs utilize cryptographic techniques such as encryption, hashing, and digital signatures to safeguard data in transit.

By configuring IPsec VPNs on supplier gateways and edge gateways, organizations can ensure a secure connection between remote sites and data centers.

VMware Cloud Director has expanded its IPsec VPN features by introducing tunnel establishment on dedicated provider gateways. The contemporary VPN management platform has evolved into a three-tier architecture, enabling tenants, sub-providers, and vendors to configure and manage VPNs with enhanced flexibility and scalability. Suppliers can leverage Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to optimize IP prefix utilization within the VPN, streamlining their network management capabilities. When using IP addresses, suppliers and sub-providers can streamline BGP configuration for their tenants by leveraging IP areas to manage community assignments for both public and private addressing schemes. Suppliers and sub-providers can empower tenants with control over specific BGP configurations, thereby enhancing flexibility and management capabilities.

What’s next in simplifying the complexity of VMware-based infrastructure?

VMware Cloud Director 10.6 brings significant improvements to the provisioning of Avi Controllers and NSX Cloud Connectors, resulting in enhanced Avi Load Balancer scalability. The innovative user experience (UX) enables administrators to seamlessly integrate additional Cloud Controllers into existing Avi Controllers, thereby facilitating enhanced scalability and performance. What’s more, the user experience provides invaluable data on consumption metrics for Avi controllers, NSX cloud, and edge gateways, thereby enabling directors to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and optimization.

Safety Log Ingestion

VMware Cloud Director now enables seamless log ingestion, seamlessly integrating with VMware Aria Operations for Logs. The NSX Gateway Firewall and Distributed Firewall logs are currently processed by VMware Aria Operations for Logs, providing seamless access to these logs through the tenant portal for ease of retrieval. This integration enables tenants to quickly identify specific events using filters and time ranges, and export logs to CSV files for further analysis and reporting.

Download and install the latest version of VMware Cloud Director 10.6 to get started.
To access in-depth guidance on utilizing and setting up VCD 10.6, we recommend consulting the official documentation provided by the software’s developers for authoritative information.
Visit the dedicated VMware Cloud Director webpage at vmware.com for additional assets and information.
To access API details, explore both legacy API documentation and OpenAPI specifications.

Object Storage Extension 3.1

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension Model 3.1 brings forth innovative features alongside:

MinIO supports seamless integration with exterior Kubernetes clusters via its MinIO Operator and MinIO Server. By leveraging the power of Kubernetes, you can easily deploy, manage, and scale your MinIO storage solution alongside your existing applications.
Implementing shopper IP forwarding for bespoke bucket entry administration.
Streamlined Kubernetes Backup and Restore Interface for Elevated Transparency and Management?
OSIS updates for S3-compliant storage providers and streamlined asynchronous tenant onboarding capabilities ensure seamless interoperability across the cloud infrastructure ecosystem.

Access OpenShot Effects (OSE) version 3.1 through its official website or repository, then navigate to the comprehensive documentation for in-depth understanding of its features, functionality, and usage guidelines.