As mentioned last week VMware released vCloud Director SP 8.10 and with it a list of significant new features and improvements. In this series I’ll go through most of the new additions a little deeper and comment around their significance. As I talked about last week in my introductory post one of the major updates was full support for NSX 6.1.x and 6.2.x. This coincides with the end of support for vCloud Networking and Security which will go EOL later this year.
This move will force vCAN Service Providers to upgrade to NSX from vShield sooner rather than later and in my opinion that is a good thing even though there are additional architecture complexities to design around as well as the increased cost pressures.
- vCD SP 8.10 New Features Part 1
- vCD SP 8.10 New Features Part 2
- vCD SP 8.10 New Features Part 3
NSX Edge Improvements:
Technically whats different in the vCD 8.10 SP release is that all vDC Edge Gateways are deployed as full NSX Edges whereas before if vCD initiated an Edge deployment the VSE would be deployed at the latest 5.5.x version. Shown below is a comparison of the versions from previous vCD SP builds and the new 8.10 build.
What’s different here is that there is full support NSX ESGs configured through the vCD UI however through the vCD UI you still only have access to configure the base services as shown below. If you go to the Web Client you will see that all the enhanced NSX Edge services are enabled.
One of the other benefits is that there was a lot of issues around the VIX API and VSE monitoring between the NSX Manager and the vCD Cells and Edges loosing sync and become unmanageable. NSX ESGs are monitored and maintained through a Message Bus in a host module which is a lot more stable and should remove those loss of manageability issues. While legacy VSEs are still supported it’s now suggested that all existing VSEs are upgraded to the available ESG version from the NSX Edges Menu under the Networking & Security section of the Web Client.
NSX Advanced Networking Support:
While I am unable to talk about this product in any great detail, most vCAN Service Providers know that there is a ANS product being released that will allow deeper integration between vCD and NSX that will allow vCD Tenants to fully utilize all the features of the NSX Edge Gateways…this has been prepped since the 5.6.x releases and if you right click on an edge gateway you will see a hint of what’s to come.
Official Supportability Matrix:
Below is the official supportability matrix for all vCD SP release and NSX-v…as shown below, 8.10 is good with NSX 6.2.3, 6.1.5 and 6.1.6 but not 6.1.7.
