This week sees the v4.0 release of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. This release follows on from the EHC v3.5 release, and brings some much requested features and functionality.
The biggest new feature of EHC v4.0 has to be the ability to support EHC services (IaaS, STaaS, BaaS, CA, DRaaS) across multiple sites with multiple vCenter endpoints. Previously in EHC v3.5 EHC customers could only avail of all services for single or dual site only, with any additional sites or vCenter instances limited to IaaS-only services.
Out of the box, EHC v4.0 now supports up to 4 fully enabled vCenter server endpoints that can be a combination of single site, remote site, Disaster Recovery or Continuous Availability configurations.
A key contributor to this expanded support is the new object model design which has been created for EHC. Using it’s own SQL DB, the EHC Object Model provides a framework for storing and referencing metadata related to infrastructure and compute resources. It acts as the rules engine for provisioning storage, backup service levels, and inter-site or intra-site protection services.The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud object model is presented to vRealize Orchestrator through a combination of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud vRealize Orchestrator plug-in (New) and the VMware Dynamic Data Types plug-in.
The Data Protection Services in EHC have been improved greatly with enhancements in backup services with EMC Avamar for active-passive grids, additional intra-site Continuous Availability services on EMC VPLEX, and VM-level disaster recovery services with EMC RP4VM.
And then there’s the vRA catalog. Everybody loves vRA catalog items and services! EHC v4.0 brings LOADS of nice new catalog services.
The EHC v4.0 catalog includes additional services for EHC platform infrastructural operations, including the following:
- EHC Global Options Maintenance
- EHC Site Maintenance (Add/Update/Delete)
- EHC Hardware Island Maintenance (Add/Update/Delete)
- VMware vCenter Maintenance (Add/Update/Delete)
- EHC Tenant Workload Cluster Maintenance (Associate/Onboard/Edit/Delete)
- EHC Datastore Maintenance (Add/Edit/Delete)
- Note: The Delete workflow will delete a datastore object from the EHC object model. Deletion of the physical datastore is a manual task.
- EHC Backup Service Level maintenance (Display/Add/Delete)
- EMC Avamar Grid Maintenance (Add/Edit/Delete)
- EMC Avamar Proxy Maintenance (Add/Delete)
- EMC Avamar Site Relationship and Avamar Replication Relationship Maintenance (Add/Edit/Delete)
- RP4VM vRPA Cluster Maintenance
- RP4VM Post Failover Cleanup
In addition to all of the above, are the new EHC Encryption Services with EMC CloudLink. As well as support for CloudLink SecureVM v5.5, EHC now leverages a CloudLink module and plugin for VMware vRealize Orchestrator. So as well as being able to deploy, backup, restore, DR or CA-protect your VM, you can now automatically encrypt that VM on a choice of EHC-managed sites.
And of course the EHC platform is all pre-installed and prepped on the VCE Factory floor, ready for on-site configuration across a range of Converged and HyperConverged Infrastructure platforms.
* No EHC CA solution for VxRack as VPLEX does not support ScaleIO. ** EHC with VxRail provides IaaS-only services right now.
EHC v4.0 is a big release, with a huge amount of engineering effort behind it. Have a look at the Everything Cloud at EMC community page for a more detailed Release Overview
More coverage on the wider context of this EHC release is available on Virtual Geek with @sakacc
In terms of mission critical Application workloads in the Cloud, @Sam_Lucido has a nice post covering Oracle DBaaS in EHC v4.0 here.
Resources:
EHC v4.0 Core Documentation
Reference Architecture – This document is intended to provide a brief overview of the solution, the related components, and features and services provided. This is a customer facing document, less technical and aimed at higher level management. The RA covers the full scope of EHC deliverables.
Concepts and Architecture – This document provides an introduction to the concepts and architectural options available within the EHC solution, and should be used as an aid to designing an initial EHC deployment. While this document is customer facing, it’s intended audience is EHC pre-Sales personnel. This document is more technical the the EHC Operations Solution Guide.
Administration Guide – This guide covers the various EHC use cases offered by the Hybrid Cloud solution in vRealize Automation. This document is customer facing, more technical and is aimed at IT and datacenter managers and administrators as well as infrastructure and application administrators.
Infrastructure and Operations Management Guide – This guide covers the various EHC infrastructure and operations management. This document is customer facing, more technical and is aimed at IT and datacenter managers and administrators as well as infrastructure and application administrators.
Security Management Solution Guide – Security Management – This document provides information on configuring secure system operations for an EMC Hybrid Cloud
Scamallach 