4.2 VMware Cloud Director

In addition to the ongoing support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, starting from Veeam Cloud Connect 9.5 Update 4 Cloud Connect supports also native replication services towards VMware Cloud Director.

Veeam Cloud Connect supports VMware Cloud Director versions 9.5 to 10.2, and 10.3. Version 10.3 is supported starting from Veeam Backup & Replication 11a (build 11.0.1.1261).

Underlying vSphere environment

The vSphere comments exposed in the previous chapter are valid also for Cloud Director: from an infrastructure point of view, Cloud Director is on top of the vSphere environment, and the two layers can even be offered at the same time to Cloud Connect tenants.

The most important information, when consuming Cloud Director, is that in this case Veeam Cloud Connect DOES NOT CREATE ANY NEW OBJECT like in vSphere environments. No hardware plan, no portgroups, no vlans; Cloud Connect simply connects to Cloud Director and consumes existing resources already created there. So, any resource that needs to be exposed to a tenant has to be created in advance in Cloud Director.

This is a feature mapping chart between the two layers:

	VSPHERE	VCLOUD
Tenant	Local account	vCloud Organization
Resources	Hardware Plan (resource pool)	Org vDC (Virtual DataCenter)
Networking	VLAN-backed portgroups	VXLAN Org Networks
Router/Firewall	Veeam NEA	VMware NSX

Service account

Veeam Backup & Replication needs to connect to both Cloud Director and the connected vSphere environments. During the setup of the Cloud Director environment in the Veeam console:

4.6: Add vCloud Director

a credential to connect and operate on Cloud Director is required. A dedicated account for Veeam Cloud Connect should be created in the Cloud environment with role System Administrator:

4.7: Add a new user in vCloud Director

With this dedicated account, it is easier to filter logs and identify activities belonging to Veeam Cloud Connect in vCloud Director, so that problem solving should be easier. Additionally, it is extremely easy to disable any access of Veeam Cloud Connect to the vCloud environment, if needed, by simply disabling this user.

Once the user is created the user can be configured in Veeam when registering vCloud Director:

4.8: Specify dedicated user account to connect to vCloud Director

One additional step compared to the registration of vSphere is the connection to the underlying vCenter servers. Plural because one vCloud Director system can manage multiple vCenter servers at the same time. These servers need to be specifically registered as belonging to vCloud Director even if they have been already registered as standalone vCenter servers before in Veeam Cloud Connect:

4.9: Register all the connected vCenter servers

The registration process is correctly completed, and vCcloud Director is added to the managed platform:

4.10: vCloud Director is added to Veeam Backup & Replication