VMware has announced the general availability of vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud onDemand Service. The platform would soon be getting enhanced disaster recovery and advanced networking services.
vCloud Air became generally available in August 2013. Since the target segment is primarily enterprise customers, VMware sold its cloud service only through traditional sales channels. Announced at VMworld 2014, vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand Services bring self-service and pay-per-use capabilities to the platform. With this, even smaller organisations and startups can sign up for vCloud Air through the self-service web portal. New customers signing up for the service can start with $300 worth of free credits. The service supports launching cloud resources in US and UK regions. VMware has a calculator to estimate the hourly pricing of various compute, storage and networking services. vCloud Air’s new billing model is similar to other public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Disaster recovery is another new feature which will be available in Q1 2015. It supports replicating VMs and data from on-premises to vCloud Air providing warm-standby. VMware customers with investments in vSphere can take advantage of this service with native compatibility between their virtualisation platform and public cloud. This service is independent of other vCloud services that need to be subscribed separately. VMware customers running vSphere 5.1, vCenter 5.1 and vSphere Replication 5.6 can immediately configure DR on vCloud Air. In the event of a failover, VMware will allocate compute resources to the DR environment within 4 hours. According to VMware, this service is not a managed DR offering and does not maintain runbooks for customers. Failover testing and live recovery must be planned, scheduled and/or executed by the customers.
In addition to self-service disaster recovery protection for virtual machines and Recovery point objectives (RPO) from 15 minutes to 24 hours, the service supports:
- Self-service disaster recovery protection for virtual machines
- Recovery point objectives (RPO) from 15 minutes to 24 hours
- Automated failover testing, planned migrations and recovery
- Elastic cloud compute and storage capacity
- Support for offline data seeding
- Private leased line network options
- Configurable failover testing
Based on VMware NSX, vCloud Air also supports advanced networking scenarios. This enables enhanced security and strong isolation of resources running on the public cloud. The vCloud Air networking stack will support Fine-grained network security groups and isolation which will allow customers to define policies that allow or deny network traffic to workloads. Dynamic Routing is also offered, with support for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) based routing to integrate on-premises and cloud-based environments. This should result in simplified configuration.
In addition vCloud Air will support up to 200 virtual networks, has VPN support for point to site connectivity, and enhanced load balancing with support for HTTPS.