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VMware Cloud Director delivers secure, isolated, and elastic virtual datacenter compute, network, storage and security in a self-service model.

Note that since April 2020, vCloud Director for Service Providers changed its product name to VMware Cloud Director.

VMware Cloud Director, also referred to as VCD, is a cloud services platform that delivers secure, isolated, and elastic virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security in a self-service model. VMware Cloud Director obtains its resources from an underlying virtual infrastructure. After you register vSphere resources in VMware Cloud Director, you can allocate these resources for organizations to use.

The cloud resources of VMware Cloud Director interact with the infrastructure below.

On June 27, 2024 the new VMware Cloud Director 10.6 is finally in GA (Build 24055916 and installed build 24055813) as part of the VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) offering.

Software versions

  • VMware vSphere 8.0.3 is supported
  • VMware NSX 4.1.2 is supported
  • The VMware Cloud Director appliance is now based on Photon OS 4.0, which brings improved security and upgraded OS packages.
  • For external PostgreSQL configurations, VMware Cloud Director 10.6 requires PostgreSQL version 13 or later.
  • For more information on software compatibility see: Product Interoperability Matrix

Three-Tier Tenancy

VMware Cloud Director allows cloud providers to establish a multi-layered organizational structure through the UI, known as the three-tier tenancy model, to create sub-provider organizations with limited administrative privileges over a specific set of tenants.

Use cases include reselling cloud services through resellers or managed service providers and enabling nested multi-tenancy within enterprise organizations. With this capability, cloud providers can grant restricted access to specific resources and services within their infrastructure, ensuring that each tenant has controlled access to only the resources they need. This enhanced tenancy model also enables greater scalability, flexibility, and security, as cloud providers can easily manage and provision resources across multiple levels of administration.

This release brings three-tier tenancy capability to all aspects of resources and services available through VMware Cloud Director.

See Overview of VMware Cloud Director Administration in the VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Guide and Understanding the Sub-Provider Role in VMware Cloud Director in the VMware Cloud Director Sub-Provider and Tenant Guide.

Scale Limits

This release brings significant maximum scale increase in several areas of the platform such as:

  • The maximum number of VMs per VMware Cloud Director instance has been increased to 55,000, regardless of power state.
  • The number of concurrent remote consoles supported has been increased to 22,000.
  • The maximum number of users supported by the platform has been increased to 300,000.
  • The organizational model for grouping Virtual Data Center Collections (Org VDCs) has been revamped to adopt a three-tier structure. Under this new design, the Sub-Provider can now manage Data Center Groups, which can accommodate up to 2000 members (previously 16) and share networks and uplinks among them.

Multiple IDP Protocols and Local users

VMware Cloud Director allows organizations to utilize multiple identity provider protocols (IDP), including LDAP, SAML, and OpenId Connect (OIDC), for a more comprehensive authentication approach. By leveraging external identity providers, you can benefit from the latest advancements in authentication technology. It’s worth noting that while local users are still supported for evaluation purposes in the current release, their use in production is being deprecated, and will continue to be fully supported until the next major release of VMware Cloud Director.

Enhanced Encryption Management

VMware Cloud Director 10.6 introduces several enhancements to the encryption management feature:

  • Multiple Key Providers can be registered simultaneously, providing greater flexibility and scalability.
  • The cluster name can be edited during key provider publishing, allowing service providers to easily identify which key provider belongs to which tenant.
  • When authenticating a Key Provider or registering a new key, users can now opt for generating a new key for each encryption operation, ensuring added security.
  • A new key rotation feature has been introduced, enabling automatic key rotation based on configuration settings. This process is non-disruptive and ensures seamless encryption.
  • VMware Cloud Director 10.6 introduces a new feature that allows users to apply different encryption policies to different storage policies, providing greater flexibility and customization in their encryption strategies.
  • When deleting an encryption policy, VMware Cloud Director 10.6 now provides the option to ‘Do not re-encrypt’ previously encrypted data.

More information

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