With clockwork efficiency after less than 6 months there a is new major release of vCloud Director – version 10. As usual, I will try to summarize all the new functionality compared to the previous release 9.7. I have similar posts about 9.7, 9.5 and 9.1 so you can get quickly up to speed if you are not familiar with them as well.
User Interface
From the tenant UI perspective the HTML5 UI (/tenant) has been evolving to add missing legacy (Flex) UI functionality. You can now customize VM network adapter during VM creation, change user password and user settings.
The top ribbon bar now provides more information and new search option.
New universal tenant login page (/login) was added:
cell-management-tool manage-config -n flex.ui.enabled -v true
Among some of the new Provider UI features are:
- compute policy management (VM Sizing Policies and Provider VDC specific VM Placement Policies).
- SDDC Proxy and token management (CPOM feature)
API
- API version has been bumped up to 33.0, while versions 27.0-32.0 are still supported but 27.0 and 28.0 are marked for deprecation.
- There is a new API authentication mechanism. The OpenAPI provides two different authentication endpoints (one for provider: /cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions/provider the other for tenants /cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions). You can disable for API version 33.0 the old authentication mechanism (/api/sessions) with the following command:cell-management-tool manage-config -n vcloud.api.legacy.nonprovideronly -v trueThis means it is now quite easy with Web Application Firewall to protect the provider API authentication from the internet.
- OpenAPI provides new (faster) way to collect audit events from vCloud Director via AuditTrail API call. Note that vCloud Director now stores audit events only for limited time in order to keep the database size and query speed manageable.
- The NSX-T related networking APIs are not pass-through as was the case with NSX-V and instead use the OpenAPI calls.
- vCloud Director Appliance API: each appliance node now provides its own appliance API to get database state provide by replication manager. It is also possible to remotely execute database standby node promotion and thus automate database failover with external tooling or load balance to the active database node for 3rd party database usage.
GET https://<appliance IP>:5480/api/1.0.0/is_primary
GET https://<appliance IP>:5480/api/1.0.0/nodes
POST https://<appliance IP>:5480/api/1.0.0/nodes/<node name>/promote
Other Features
- Improved vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) integration. Two more custom properties vcd_sessionToken and _vcd_apiEndpoint can be passed from vCloud Director to vRO workflow so the workflow during its execution can connect in the particular user context via the vCloud Director Plugin to vCloud Director and provide access only to those objects the user has access to.
The spelling of two other custom properties was fixed from _vdc_userName and _vdc_isAdmin to _vcd_userName and _vcd_isAdmin (but is still backwards compatible).
The new vRO vCloud Director Plugin now also supports vRO Clustering so the vCloud Director connection is automatically shared across vRO nodes.