vcd564_build
In October 2014 VMware released vCD SP 5.6.3 which was the first version of vCloud Director that was forked for Service Providers. As I mentioned in this post there was a catch with the 5.6.3 release in that if you were running vCloud 5.5.2.x an in place upgrade was not possible. I was made aware that a 5.6.4 SP build was in the works and I got to test an advanced build in early January which let me upgrade 5.5.2.x lab instances to 5.6.4 which meant the new functionality available in the 5.6.x SP build was accessible for testing.

As promised in that post the official 5.6.4 SP Build was released last Friday (vmware-vcloud-director-5.6.4-2496071.bin) and can be downloaded from here for those with the correct MyVMware entitlements. The release notes show that the only new additions in this release is the ability to upgrade from 5.5.2 and 5.5.2.1 as well as some additional GuestOS Support.

Interoperability and NSX-v:

vcd564_build_2

One big new feature of this build is it’s official interoperability support for NSX-v 6.1.2 (PDF here) No mention of vSphere 6.0 Support just yet…but that is something I am chasing up internally as well. There are also a bunch of bug fixes …some that carry over from 5.5.2.x which were contained in the initial 5.6.3 SP release.

An interesting side note…I saw this entry in the PDF

vCloud Director 5.6 for service providers will be generally supported through 10/6/2016.

I will chase up exactly what that means and report back……in the mean time those that have access to the SP builds…download the binaries and get testing ready for production upgrades.

UPDATE: I’ve been able to clarify what the above supportability statement refers to in the PDF. Each major or minor release is supported for 2 years. This means that the 5.6.x versions are supported until this date. Once 6.x (or the next major/minor version) the support clock moves forward for that version. A pretty good indication that vCD SP will not be going away any time in the near future.