In light of the recent announcement of OVH acquiring the vCloud Air business from VMware (vCloud Blog) (OVH page) we have received some questions from our Service provider community around the future development of vCloud Director®. We are pleased to confirm that vCloud Director continues to be owned and developed by VMware’s Cloud Provider Software Business Unit and is the strategic cloud management platform for vCloud Air Network service providers. VMware has been and continues to be committed to its investment and innovation in vCloud Director.

With the recent release of vCloud Director 8.20 in February 2017 VMware has doubled down on its dedication to enhancing the product, and, in addition, is working to expand its training program to keep pace with the evolving needs of its users. In December 2016 we launched the Instructor Led Training for vCloud Director 8.10 (information and registration link) and in June 2017 we are pleased to be able to offer a Instructor Led Training program for vCloud Director 8.20.

Exciting progress is also occurring with vCloud Director’s expanding partner ecosystem. We are working to provide ISVs with streamlined access and certification to vCloud Director to provide service providers with access to more pre-certified capabilities with the ongoing new releases of vCloud Director. By extending our ecosystem service providers are able to more rapidly monetize services for their customers (How VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers and ISVs Get the Most Out of VMware vCloud Director).

vCloud Director has also recently inundated the social media newsfeeds. In mid-February, bloggers tweeted away (Tweetosphere Lights Up: #LongLiveVCD) about their take on the recent release of vCloud Director 8.20. Anthony Spiteri, a technical evangelist at Veeam who writes the blog Virtualization Is Life, nicely summed up the new commitment VMware has made to the vCloud Director solution. It’s a “significant release,” he wrote. “The eighth major release for vCloud Director since 1.0 was released in 2010.”

“This latest version,” added blogger David Hill, a cloud strategist at VMware, “is packed full of features and updates to help the ever-growing [VMware] vCloud Air Network service providers deploy enterprise-grade public cloud offerings” that can do more than ever before. Like what?

Rapidly Monetize New Services



“Full [VMware] NSX support now allows NSX capabilities to be exposed and consumed in a multitenant, self-service fashion,” blogged Hill. “Service providers have granular role-based access control (RBAC) over these capabilities, which enables them to carefully govern what their tenants can do.”

With the vCloud Director 8.20 solution, service providers can make more money—1.5 to 2 times more, over a 36-month period—from exposing new VMware NSX® capabilities and charging their customers for them.

Spiteri called out the new and better user-interface features. “While the UI additions only extend to NSX for the moment, it’s brilliant to see what the development team have done.” Blogger and IT consultant Jacob Gardiner-Moon added, “I’m very glad that VMware is going toward HTML5. The control panels are a lot more responsive than previous tools.”

And the virtualization and cloud blog Inspired by Digital Technology added, “The solution now integrates more closely with VMware NSX network virtualization, which means that end users will be able to customize many network settings.”

Gain Radical Operating Efficiency



With vCloud Director 8.20, service providers can improve the VM-to-admin ratio by three times, or save $1.35 million upfront and $250,000 in annual maintenance costs instead of a custom solution. It all comes down to the scalability and efficiency of the vCloud Director solution across shared VMware vCenter™ environments.

In a sentiment echoed by VCDX56, a blog about virtualization, Tomas Fojta, a principal architect at VMware, wrote about the new orchestrated upgrade feature in vCloud Director 8.20. “All cells and vCloud databases can be upgraded with a single command from the primary cell VM. This brings two advantages. Simplicity—it is no longer needed to log in to each cell VM, upload binaries, and execute upgrade processes manually. Availability—downtime during the upgrade maintenance window is reduced.”

Folks at GetProTech, a company that offers VMware training, blogged that with the release of vCloud Director 8.20, users have a significant “level of control over their virtual infrastructure.”

‘Adopt’ Existing Resources



With vCloud Director 8.20 and its “Adopt a vCenter” capability, service providers can retire small, low-margin VMware vCenter servers and stop their current DIY approach of creating custom code on top of vCenter servers.

Along with Fojta and Hill, blogger Spiteri had praise for this new feature: “The Automatic VM Discovery and Import is a significant feature that goes along with the 8.10 feature of live VM imports and helps administrators import VM workloads into vCD from vCenter.”

Keep updated on the VMware vCloud Director solution by regularly reading these bloggers, watch our video and please plan to attend our next vmLIVE session where we will provide a sneak peek at vCloud Director.Next roadmap.