What's New in VMware vCloud Director 1.5

In vCloud Director 1.0, VM provisioning operations resulted in the creation of full clones, delivered to users within minutes through a simple web portal. With the enablement of linked clones in vCloud Director 1.5, users no longer have to wait for a full copy each time they deploy a vApp. vCloud Director “links” clones together so that common elements are stored only once. This improves agility in the cloud by reducing provisioning time, from minutes down to seconds, and reducing the cost of storage by up to 10x.

• Builds on vSphere and scalesup to 10,000 VMs and 25 vCenter Servers
• Creates virtual datacenters, by pooling resources into new units of consumption
• Securely enables the cloudwith vShield, LDAP authentication, and RBAC
• Provides self-service portals and standardized infrastructure catalogs
• Isolates users into organizationswith unique catalogs, policies, and LDAP
• vCloud Director builds on vSphere to transform IT
• vCloud API enables inter-cloud portability, programmatic control, and integrationsIT
• Fast Provisioning Utilizing linked clones dramatically speeds up provisioning time and reduces storage costs.
• vApp Custom Guest Properties: Allows developers and other users to easily pass user data into guest OSes using OVF descriptors.
• vCloud Messages and Blocking Tasks: Programmatically connect vCloud Director to enterprise systems (e.g. CMDB) enabling end-to-end system automation.
• Microsoft SQL Server Support: Now runs on SQL Server (as well as Oracle).
• vShield Edge VPN integration: Programmatically create site to site IPSec-VPN tunnels to connect across clouds.
• Expanded vCloud API: Additional commands added to the vCloud API namespace to include all GUI-accessible actions and enable broader integration and scripting using the API.