By: Chris Spencer

On the heels of the many announcements from VMworld, we’re happy to share additional new capabilities to improve your public and hybrid cloud experience with vCloud Air. With these additional capabilities, you will be able to migrate more of your existing applications to the cloud as well as build new applications native to the cloud. All of these are available on vCloud Air today.

Enterprise SQL Server 2014 in the Public Cloud

We are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 in vCloud Air. Offered in our Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand catalog, users will find a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 image with the latest SQL Server Enterprise template. This provides customers the ability to build, test and run enterprise grade SQL databases in the public cloud at an extremely competitive price point. Under the covers we are leveraging virtual machine host affinity to deliver the best licensing value to our customers. With SQL Server 2014, even more of your production applications can be migrated to vCloud Air without requiring any change. For more information, check out the options here or try it out in your VPC OnDemand environment.

VMware Photon OS – Tech Preview

Many born-in-the-cloud applications are built with containers and we are extremely excited about the capabilities of running these cloud native apps in vCloud Air using the VMware Photon Platform announced at VMWorld. Purpose-built for running containers such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos in VMware environments on- and off-premises, Photon OS is a lightweight Linux container runtime designed to integrate with VMware infrastructure. In Tech Preview today, vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand is a great way to learn about and explore containers first-hand – all in a pay-as-you-go environment.

Bitnami App Installer

VMware and Bitnami have partnered to deliver over 100 common applications into vCloud Air. From WordPress to Drupal to SugarCRM, users can launch their favorite apps to vCloud Air with just a few simple clicks. Now we’ve made it even easier by integrating a connection directly to Bitnami from inside our user portal. Test new apps in the cloud without commitment and pay only for what you use.

vCloud Air Health Status Page

To make it easier to check on the service, we’ve launched a health status page. Here you will find the current and past status of all of our services across all regions including updated status alerts and scheduled maintenance notifications. Accessible from within the vCloud Air portal as well, bookmark this page to get real-time updates about vCloud Air.

Identity and Access Enhancements

VDC Permissions for OnDemand

Virtual data centers are a great way to separate and isolate workloads. They provide logical isolation and independent networking configurations to ensure that different apps can be organized separately. With Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, IT Admins can now more easily control Virtual Data Center (VDC) access for subsets of users from within the OnDemand user portal. Simply right-click on the VDC name and edit the permissions to make it accessible to some, none, or all of your users as you see fit.

User Groups

As you may have heard in our latest vCloud Air Tech Talks video, users can now set up and manage user groups for larger level administrative control on VPC OnDemand as well. This adds to our existing capabilities of role based access control (RBAC) and sets the stage for the additional capabilities of external federation and Identity Access Management that were announced in Barcelona. Stay tuned for news on future authentication features very soon.

All of these new capabilities are now available on vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand where it is simple to sign up and take advantage of $300 free credit for new users. For those already on the platform, you may notice a new look and feel to our user portal. These are all part of the ongoing enhancements with vCloud Air so keep checking back for updates!

If you’re ready to get started with the hybrid cloud, visit vCloud.VMware.com.

Be sure to check out the vCloud Air Community, where you can join or start a discussion, watch our latest vTech Talk video, enter for a chance to win swag in our monthly giveaways and more. Get started here!

For future updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook at @vCloud and Facebook.com/VMwarevCloud.

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