The Power of Self Service
In today’s world, it’s hard to imagine a day without self-service. From self-service kiosks that allow us to check-in conveniently, to the coffee machines that hand out our morning coffee. We are surrounded by self-service tools that make our lives easier.
Self-service is a powerful concept because it’s secure, flexible, and easy to use. Backup and recovery for single or multi-tenant environments should be no exception to this.
Self-Service Backup and Recovery
Most service providers (excluding hyperscalers) lack large R&D investments for in-house development of multi-tenant, self-service solutions. As a result, they may opt for loosely integrated open source tools or cobbled together solutions for cost-effective delivery and rapid time-to-market. This is a common approach, especially for non-hyperscalers, but it can drive up the providers’ cost and complexity. This also yields a sub-optimal user experience for their tenants.
VMware vCloud Director, commonly referred to as “vCD”, is a multi-tenant cloud provisioning and management platform for service providers. It enables service providers to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with self-service on top of their VMware infrastructure.
Cohesity Extension for VMware vCloud Director
In partnership with VMware, Cohesity brings the power of self-service to vCloud Director (vCD) tenants for backup and recovery with secure, native integration into the HTML UI. The experience is seamless for tenants because backup and recovery tasks take place in a single UI along with their IaaS tasks. This is more convenient than requiring them (or the provider) to hop back-and-forth between multiple, discrete UIs.
Our integration complements support for automated protection of vCD objects including vOrgs, Provider VDCs, virtual applications (vApp), and virtual machines (VMs). This safeguards enterprise data for single or multiple tenants at scale. Each tenant environment remains secure with automated, role-based access controls.
Service providers can run backups and restore automatically through policies or on demand. They can also speed vApp and VM recovery on-premises or across multi-clouds. They can restore a subset of VMs, individual files, or an entire vApp instantly.
Under the hood, Cohesity Extension for VMware vCloud Director leverages the power of our REST API to deliver self-service backup and recovery at your fingertips.
Provider View and Tenant View
We feature two views for VMware vCD: a provider view and a tenant view.
Provider view offers service providers the flexibility to configure multiple Cohesity clusters and map vCD tenants to Cohesity organizations. Service provider administrators can efficiently perform on-boarding of tenants. Role-based access control (RBAC) is baked-in.Tenants can only backup or restore VMs that are assigned to them.
Tenant view offers tenant administrators the flexibility they need for self-service backup and recovery. Tenants can manage backup and recovery for their virtual data center directly from the vCD tenant portal without the need to log in to a separate interface.
A dashboard allows tenants to see an overview of their protection status. Using simple workflows, they have the flexibility to perform policy-based and ad-hoc backups. They can execute in-place restores for both standalone VMs and vApps as well as self-service file-level recovery. Tenant administrators can fully or partially protect or entirely unprotect vApps.
Download the vCloud Director Extension
Integrated backup and recovery services for VMware vCloud Director streamlines operations. It also provides a rich tenant experience that allows Cohesity and VMware Cloud Provider Program partners to offer differentiated services. You can download our vCloud Director extension from GitHub. In addition, it has been showcased on the VMware Solution Exchange.
The VMware Solution Exchange is VMware’s ecosystem marketplace. It is a central location where customers can research, evaluate, and rate more than 2,500 solutions from VMware technology partners, systems integrators, and developers.
We love to hear from you. Please provide us your feedback and suggestions at: cohesity-api-sdks@cohesity.com
Additional References
- Solution Brief: Integrated Protection for All Your Data in VMware vCloud Director.
- Cohesity and VMware vCloud Director: Simplicity Meets Multi-Tenant Protection.
- The Hybrid Cloud Gets Better: Meet vCloud Director 9.7
- Video: Cohesity Extension for VMware vCloud Director
- Video: Cohesity Integrated Backup and Recovery for VMware vCloud Director
- Video: Cohesity Offerings for Service Providers
Cohesity’s Shreyas Agnihotri, Member of Technical Staff, contributed to this blog.
