vCloud ecosystem announcements at VMware Partner Exchange

It is has been a while since I wrote anything about vCloud Director itself… Primarily because I have been focused on other things within the vCloud Suite the last couple of months. This week various partners of VMware announced new products at VMware Partner Exchange 2013 (By the way, 2014 is scheduled to be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco). I wanted to take a couple of minutes to provide a quick overview of what was announced. Personally I think it is great that we are starting to see more and more partners developing products and solutions to enhance the vCloud Director experience, especially in the Backup/Restore space this was more than welcome. So what was announced this week so far, in no particular order:

Zerto announced Virtual Replication 3.0
In a blog article they explain what is new and improved in version 3.0. What I personally think is exciting is the fact that they support vCloud Director 5.1 and provide support and integration with vCloud Automation Center. On top of that the 3.0 product offers a self-service portal, I bet this is what a lot of the service providers were waiting for. It will make creating DR as a Service solution offering a lot simpler. There is a lot more added, so for all the details make sure you hit the links above.
Veeam announced version 7 of Veeam Backup and Replication with vCloud Director integration
I guess the title says it all. With version 7 Veeam will support vCloud Director environment. Veeam will not only allow you to back up the VMs in a vCloud Director vApp but it will also allow you to back all vApp metadata and attributes. Of course restore functionality of vApps and VMs directly in to vCloud Director is included. Definitely something I know a lot people were waiting for.
Commvault announced Simpana version 10 with vCloud Director integration
I have always been impressed with Commvault’s backup solution. It is simple and robust. So you can imagine I was happy when I found out they were working on integration Simpana with vCloud Director. I can’t find too much details about the level of integration to be honest, but there is a long list of new features in version 10 to be found here. Hopefully we will find out more soon. For more details it probably easier to read Viktor’s post then it is to read the Commvault website.
EMC announced VMAX Cloud Edition
Not so much specifically targeted at vCloud users, but more at Service Providers who are looking to build a large fully self-service cloud environment. VMAX Cloud Edition is not a bigger or more scalable version of VMAX, no it is a fully self-service, multi-tiered and multi-tenancy capable VMAX. No point in me diving too deep, as Chad wrote an excellent article about VMAX Cloud Edition, make sure to read it.