NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.3 support for VMware Cloud Director [Sponsored]

Last month, NAKIVO released a new feature-packed version of their data protection solution Backup & Replication. This version includes a range of new features including expanded support for Microsoft 365, Direct Connect for MSPs and support for VMware Cloud Director (previously known as VMware vCloud Director) which I want to cover in a bit more detail in this blogpost.

What is VMware Cloud Director?

VMware Cloud Director (VCD) is the leading VMware cloud service-delivery platform. Thousands of Cloud Providers and Managed Services Providers (MSPs) across the globe have been using VCD for many years to deliver all kinds of cloud services to their customers. VCD allows cloud providers to carve up their VMware provider infrastructure into multi-tenant virtual data centers. It abstracts the complexity of the underlying infrastructure away from the end users / customers and delivers an easy to use, fully automated self-service platform via an intuitive UI or APIs:

VCD provides customers with one or more Organizations with one or more underlying Organization Virtual Data Centers. This is where customers can deploy their workloads into so called vApps. A vApp contains one or more Virtual Machines that make up a specific application.

Data protection in VMware Cloud Director

As you might have noticed by now, customers do not have access to vCenter Server. vCenter is part of the provider infrastructure and VCD integrates with it. VCD constructs, such as vApps, vApp Networks, Organizations, Virtual Data Centers and so on, are mapped to VCD-managed objects in vCenter such as VMs, Resource Pools, Segments and such. These objects and their hierarchy are stored in the VCD database. This means data protection solutions need to specifically support VCD because just backing up the vCenter Server objects without the accompanying metadata and hierarchy stored in the VCD database will not provide you with a proper recovery path.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication support for VMware Cloud

The VMware Cloud Director Backup feature in Backup & Replication v10.3 allows you to back up Cloud Director objects, such as vApps, individual VMs and storage policies, and restore them directly to the VMware Cloud Director hierarchy. When it comes to recovery, NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.3 backs up all vApp metadata, that is, vApp information, networks, organization, VM options, etc., needed to recover files, app objects, VMs or the entire vApp to the same location or to a different location.

Free trial available

If you want to find out more about the v10.3 release, I recommend checking out this release blogpost or go to NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.3 to try out NAKIVO Backup & Replication for free!