VMware vCloud ^® Connector™

VMware vCloud Connector Core Edition is a free downloadable product from VMware that lets you copy, view, and operate your computing resources, using a single pane of glass, across private vSphere, private vCloud Director and our set of vCloud Service Provider partners. Moving beyond workload transfer, vCloud Connector Advanced Edition lets you extend the logical boundaries of your datacenter, and lets you manage a single content catalog across the entire cloud environment.

VMware vCloud Connector makes hybrid cloud computing easy. Whether you need an internal private cloud, a public cloud, or a hybrid cloud that combines the best of both, vCloud Connector can get you there. Bring your existing applications, workloads and templates to a public cloud while retaining the freedom to move these applications back into your own datacenter when desired. Built-in compression, multi-part transfer and checkpoint restart makes transferring workloads between your connected clouds reliable and easy, all from a single pane of glass.

The ‘Core’ edition of VMware vCloud Connector is available to all current vSphere and vCloud Director customers as a free download. It is also included in the latest vSphere suites. To get support for the Core edition of vCloud Connector, you must have an active support contract for vSphere or vCloud Director. The ‘Advanced’ edition of vCloud Connector, which includes the Datacenter Extension and Content Sync features, is available exclusively as a part of the VMware vCloud Suites.

vCloud Connector comes with Release Notes and a User's Guide. The User Guide details more information on working with the clouds and how to implement them. You can also learn more in the vCloud Learning Center on vcloud.vmware.com or by participating in the vCloud Community discussion groups.

Currently, VMware vCloud Connector Advanced is not available for VSPP partners. Partners are encouraged to use vCC ‘Core’ which is freely available and included in the same download as the ‘Advanced’ edition. Customers who have license for vCC ‘Advanced’ can still use these features on VMware based public clouds. vCC ‘Advanced’ is on the roadmap and will be available to VSPP partners by mid 2013.

Yes. If the customer wants to use vCC 2.0's ‘Datacenter Extension’ feature, you would need to upgrade to vCloud Director 5.1 (with vSphere 5.1, ESXi 5.1 hosts) and vCloud Network & Security 5.1.2 or greater. A Service Provider does not need to unlock vCC 2.0 Advanced in their Public Cloud in order for their customers to use it in their environments. The customer simply needs to locally unlock their vCC Advanced via their vCloud Suite key as normal and connect to a supported Public Cloud.

You can use VMware vCloud Connector to migrate VMware vSphere virtualized servers and applications to your private or public cloud. VMware vCloud Connector provides a centralized interface to connect, view, copy, and operate vSphere virtualized applications across vSphere based clouds.

VMware vCloud Connector can also be used to leverage the hybrid cloud by connecting VMware vSphere or vCloud Director virtualized applications with a certified service from VMware’s vCloud partner ecosystem. This allows you to reuse your existing applications in the cloud and gives you the freedom to move these applications back into the data center when desired.

VMware vCloud Connector can connect vSphere 4.x and 5.x as well as vCloud Director 1.5, 5.1, and all VMware vCloud Suite-based private and public clouds. To use vCC Advanced Edition's Datacenter Extension feature, you need vSphere 5.1 & vCloud Network and Securiry 5.1 (formerly vShield) or vCloud Director 5.1 in your datacenter and an account with a vCloud Director 5.1-based public vCloud Service Provider.

vCC UI is accessible within the traditional vSphere Client 4.x and 5.x.

Visit http://vcloud.vmware.com.

You can upgrade by simply downloading vCloud Connector 2.0 and use its upgrade mechanism to upgrade from your existing vCC 1.5. vCC 2.0 Core comes with all vSphere Suites. vCC 2.0 Advanced, which includes the new Datacenter Extension and Content Sync features, is provided with purchase of any of the new vCloud Suites. Enter the vCloud Suite license key in the vCC Admin UI and you can start enjoying the Datacenter Extension and Content Sync features of vCC 2.0.

Datacenter Extension, or ‘DCE’, extends the logical boundaries of your datacenter to public clouds so you can further accelerate the deployment of your workloads while maintaining network configurations across clouds. DCE extends a private datacenter enterprise network to a public cloud by creating a layer 2 extension over a SSL VPN tunnel. This allows the customer to move workloads from the datacenter to the public cloud while retaining its network settings, including MAC & IP addresses. This allows other applications or users in the datacenter to continue to consume and use the workload, and other system management solutions can continue to manage the workload without any changes. This is how vCloud Connector Advanced connects hybrid clouds and delivers One Network.

No. In order to transfer workloads from one VMware-based cloud to another, you will still need to power off your VMs and vApps before using vCloud Connector to perform the transfer.

You can now manage a single content catalog across your entire cloud environment using Content Sync. Content Sync allows you to manage One Catalog of content across hybrid clouds. It allows you to publish a vSphere folder or a vCloud catalog and then subscribe to it from one or multiple vSphere folders or vCloud catalogs. Any new or modified templates in the published folder or catalog will be synchronized and copied to the subscribers.

No. Today these features can only be leveraged with clouds based on the VMware vCloud platform.