Overnight VMware released vCloud Director 9.1 (build 7905680) which builds on the 9.0 release that came out last September. This continues to deliver on VMware’s promise to release major vCD updates every six months or so. This update, on the surface contains fewer big ticket items than the 9.0 release however the enhancements included are actually significant and continue to build on where 9.0 left off.

New Features and Enhancements:

Enhanced Tenant Portal

HTML Provider Portal

User Interface Extensibility

Service Integration

Standalone VMRC

Multi-Site Management View

SR-IOV

FIPS Mode

Python SDK

vCD-CLI

vRealize Orchestrator Integration

Enhanced Tenant Portal:

The new Tenant UI features include vApp and Catalog enhancements while delivering on probably the biggest pain point with the Flex UI tenant portal…that is OFV/OVA management. We now have native upload and download integration without the need for the client integration plugin.

You now also get an overview of resources consumed in your Virtual Datacenters and also get a view of the multiple organisation feature introduced into 9.0.

A new Provider Portal has been seeded in this release and at the moment can only be used for the new vRealise Orchestrator extensibility functionality. The administrator can import workflows from vRO through the import option. An administrator clicks the import workflow button, selects the vRO instance, and then chooses all the workflows they would like to import. On that note, there is an updated vRO Plug-In that allows both providers and tenants to automate tasks from the portal which is an excellent feature.

There is also a new workflow for the provision of standalone VMs and vApps.

Standalone VMRC:

If the management of OVAs/OVFs wasn’t the number one pain point with the FlexUI then the next one would have had to be the pain caused by the lack of functionality in the Console window. A HTML VM console is supported in version 9.0, but 9.1 now adds support for standalone VMware Remote Console. The VMRC provides more functions such for the tenant and significantly improves access to the VM consoles and gives greater flexibility accessing the VMs.

vCD-CLI:

I’ve blogged about the old VCA-CLI on a number of occasions and it’s great to see the project officially brought back into the vCD world. Development on this stopped for a while with the demise of vCloud Air, however I’m glad to see it picked up on as it’s a great tool for managing vCloud Director tenant Organisations and objects from a command line without having to get stuck into the APIs directly. It’s also used for the new Container Services Extension that has also been released side by side with this release of vCD.

Compatibility with Veeam, vSphere 6.5 and NSX-v 6.4.x:

vCloud Director 9.1 is compatible with vSphere 6.5 Update 1 and NSX-v 6.4 and supports full interoperability with other versions as shown in the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix. With regards to Veeam support, I am sure that our QA department will be testing the 9.1 release against our integration pieces at the first opportunity they get, but as of now, there is no ETA on offical support.

A list of known issues can be found in the release notes.

Conclusion:

Overall this is a very strong release with a lot of emphasis on extensibility behind the visual enhancements and functionality of the ever evolving HTML Tenant UI. As usual, I’ll look to write a few more blog posts on specific 9.1 features over the next couple of weeks.

There is a White Paper where you can find more details about what’s contained in the 9.1 release. Tom Fojta and Daniel Paluszek VMware have a what’s new blog posts as well.

#LongLivevCD

References:

https://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/files/2018/03/vcd91newfeatureswp.pdf

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