VMware Brings Latest vCloud Director 5.6 Release to Market

VMware vCloud Director 5.6 has entered general availability. It is the first release designed exclusively for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers, giving access to new enhancements used in vCloud Air.

vCloud air was formerly known as vCloud Hybrid Service. The rebranding came along with new object storage and enhanced mobile application development capabilities. The vCloud Director update adds these new capabilities.

vCloud Director orchestrates the provisioning of software-defined data center services. The software defined data center is the major initiative at VMware, the company positioning itself as a provider of virtualized everything.

The new features are targeted at service provider customers. vCloud Director enables vCloud Air Network service providers and their customers to move on-premise workloads to the cloud.

New features are across storage tiering, security across software defined networking, enhanced monitoring, updated software development kits and the inclusion of a user interface tied into an independent software vendor ecosystem.

New in vCloud Director 5.6:

VM Disk Level Storage Profiles allows a single VM to access different tiers of storage such as storage area network, network-attached storage, and local storage to help balance storage cost versus storage performance. VMware vCloud Director 5.6 also supports VMware Virtual SAN.

VMware NSX support has been added in addition to current VMware vCloud networking and security (vCNS) support. This provides customers with easy to use security for software-defined networking using the NSX network virtualization platform.

The VM Monitoring Service provides visibility into current and historical VM performance metrics at an individual tenant level. Tenants can use this new capability to troubleshoot application performance issues, auto-scale their applications and perform capacity planning.

Updated SDKs to the vCloud API include a new set of Java, PHP, and .NET SDKs with documentation and samples available.

Independent Software Vendor Ecosystem User Interface provides ISVs with a platform that allows them access to underlying vCloud Director capabilities through APIs. These APIs enable ISVs to build multiple, flexible UI based cloud-related services, such as VM monitoring, catalogs and vApps, on top of vCloud Director 5.6 that can be leveraged by service providers. All new functionalities within vCloud Director 5.6 are only available through APIs.

“With VMware vCloud Director 5.6, we are providing the tools to VMware vCloud Air Network service providers to continue to offer customers flexibility and choice of cloud platforms on a local basis,” said Geoff Waters, vice president of service provider channel, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware.