VMware Announces vCloud Air DR, Networking Services

Shortly after rebranding its vCloud Hybrid Service as vCloud Air, VMware (VMW) announced the addition of new disaster recovery and advanced networking services for the popular private cloud platform. Disaster Recovery as a Service offers an affordable and simple solution to help businesses protect their cloud investments, according to the company.

With vCloud DR, vCloud Air and vSphere users can replicate their virtual machines and data to the cloud, where their information is housed in a warm-standby data center in case of a system failure. VMware is billing its disaster recovery solution as a simpler option for customers because vCloud Air supports all current operating systems and applications without conversions, while the solution does not require any changes to the existing virtual environment, the company noted.

“Traditional disaster recovery’s so difficult to implement, where you have to replicate data centers and bring new hardware in and buy very expensive software,” said Scott Collison, vice president of the vCloud Air division, in an interview with Virtualization Review. “The ability to do this in the cloud has been a huge thing for customers in the enterprise, all the way down to the commercial segment.”

vCloud Air DR provides native failback support so customers can replicate workloads back from vCloud Air to their primary customer environment over the network, with options to roll back their deployments to multiple earlier snapshots of the data center environment. Customers can define and deploy different strategies to streamline failover operations using a new vRealize Orchestrator DR plug-in, open source DR Command Line Interface and an expanded REST API, according to the press release.

Additionally, several advanced networking services promise to provide customers with new ways to protect and isolate their deployments. New features include fine-grained network security groups, isolation and expanded network scalability up to 200 endpoints and enhanced VPN support for point-to-site connectivity, among others. Customers also can choose several routing options to simplify their network integration between on- and off-premises environments.

VMware also announced the general availability of vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, which allows customers to only pay for the cloud services they actually utilize with a traditional monthly billing subscription. The Subscription Purchasing program promises to combine monthly billing services with a pay-as-you-go model, so customers can create an SPP fund with either pre-payment funds or choose to pay through monthly installments. VMware will charge for resources by the minute, but individuals will receive a $300 service credit upon sign-up.

VMware vCloud Virtual Private Cloud Air OnDemand is available now, with the new capabilities for vCloud Air Disaster Recovery and the advanced networking services expected to drop in Q1 2015 and during the first half of the year, respectively.