VMworld 2013: What’s New in vCloud Director 5.5
DISCLAIMER: I wrote these “What’s New” blogposts back in April. But had to sit on them until recent announcements. So the screengrabs can/may/will differ from the product when it GAs. But in effort to get you the lastest information in the shortest possible of time it seemed best to spend time writing these ready to be published.
There’s a number of improvements around vCD5.5, so lets start with a quickly high-level overview before we see them in action as it were!
Firstly the “Content Catalog” has been enhanced in a number of ways. It now allows you to share and synch content between sites, and allows you to share the catalog between specific Organizations. Changes that occur to the catalog and the objects within them are automagically “versioned” so you will see numbers increment as changes take place – both to the catalog and the items within in it. Content Catalogs are no longer restricted to merely holding vApp Templates and Media (iso/flp files) – although I suspect they may mainly continue to hold this sort of data. There’s also an “Update Catalog Item” option that allows you to keep your vApp Template up-to-date with new versions – its not quite like the Convert to Template/Covert to VM option you see in vSphere vCenter – but its close. I will look at this in the “Hot vApp” part of this blogpost because you really need running vApp in an Organization to see this properly…
Secondly, an even more Hot vApp – so its is possible to clone a vApp which are running and have an active memory state – call it extending hot-clone from vSphere up into the vCloud Director layer if you like. Additionally, its possible do the hot configuration of disks and NICs for those running VMs. Again, this extending functionality that’s being in vSphere for a while up into vCloud Director. Lastly customization of resources and Guest OS settings is possible during the provisioning of a VM within a vApp itself – this customization is of the hardware resources towards the end of adding a VM from a catalog…
Thirdly, improved vApp Import and Download – so you can directly upload/download OVFs to and from the vCloud Director portal, and the transfer service now supports resume feature – which will pick up on imports/exports if there was a network outage during the time of the upload/download.
Of course, there’s a whole host of smaller incremental changes – and hope to draw your attention to these during this blogpost. I’ve been working with the beta for 5.5 for sometime (since April), and having worked with the 5.1.1 release I’ve been playing that game of “spot the differences”. As ever we tend to flag up the big big changes, but there’s plenty “the sum is greater than the parts” stuff that might be missed if you were new to the product.