VMware, the global virtualization and cloud infrastructure vendor, has announced new enhanced disaster recovery and advanced networking services for VMware vCloud Air. VMware also announced the general availability of vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, which provides customers a quick online sign-up to pay for only those resources that are used.
As part of the general availability of vCloud Air OnDemand, VMware introduced a new program to make it easier for customers to have the predictable billing of a subscription, but only pay for cloud resources consumed with a new Subscription Purchasing Program.
vCloud Air Disaster Recovery
“Public cloud is a part of every VMware client’s view of the future because it helps them move faster and get far greater value for money from their IT Infrastructure,” said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. “VMware vCloud Air provides our clients with these benefits for both new and existing applications. The service enhancements announced today reflect strong client interest in a public cloud platform compatible with existing vSphere environments.”
The new capabilities of VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery would include:
- Native failback support – This will provide customers an easier way to resume normal data center operations in their primary data center following a failover to vCloud Air. Customers will be able to replicate workloads back from vCloud Air to the primary customer environment over the network to resume normal operations.
- Multiple recovery points – Customers will have the option to roll back to multiple earlier snapshots of their data center environment. This is vital to recover from outages caused by data corruption, viruses or hacking attacks that compromise the most recent recovery point.
- Self-service automation –Customers will be able to define and deploy recovery playbooks to streamline failover operations using a new vRealize Orchestrator DR plug-in, open source DR Command Line Interface (CLI) and an expanded REST API.
vCloud Air Disaster Recovery can be implemented in less than an hour, according to VMware and replicates virtual machines and data to vCloud Air, providing a warm-standby virtual data center in the event of a disaster. Customers would choose vCloud Air for disaster recovery because it requires zero changes to the existing virtualized environment, and because vCloud Air supports all the operating systems and applications they run today – without conversions.
vCloud Air Networking Services
VMware vCloud Air advanced networking services, powered by the VMware NSX network virtualization platform, would enable customers to achieve unprecedented security and isolation in a public cloud.
VMware promises to deliver the following benefits to customers:
- Fine-grained network security groups and isolation – Customers can define security groups that provide stateful network traffic isolation without requiring multiple virtual networks. This enables a “zero trust” security model designed to prevent insiders and intruders from gaining full network access if an application or virtual machine is compromised. It would also dramatically simplify network configuration and is implemented as a distributed firewall, so there is no network traffic bottleneck.
- Dynamic Routing – VMware vCloud Air will support both Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) based routing to simplify network integration between on-premises and cloud-based environments, allowing for redundancy and continuity in cloud-hosted application deployment. It would drive down networking and administration costs.
- Additional vCloud Advanced Networking Services – Expanded network scalability up to 200 endpoints, enhanced VPN support for point to site connectivity and enhanced load balancing with support for HTTPS.
