‘Tis the season! ServerCentral Turing Group is updating all customer VMware Cloud environments with vCloud Director 9.7.0.3 before the holidays. Here are some of the more impactful changes to come.
vShield edge gateways to be converted to advanced edge gateways
A new advanced edge gateway service was added in vCloud Director 9.5’s HTML5 portal. Starting with version 9.7, vCloud Director only supports advanced edge gateways. vShield edge gateways are now deprecated.
Advanced edge gateways expose several new features for network and security services embedded in Managed VMware Cloud environments. They have optionally been enabled on a per-customer basis.
All gateways will be automatically converted to the advanced edge gateway service once all Managed VMware Cloud environments are updated.
More IPsec configuration options
One of the many features of vCloud Director is the ability to establish IPsec VPN tunnels using the vShield and advanced edge gateway services. Though compatible with many other endpoints (Cisco, Sonicwall, Fortigate, etc.), the IPsec VPN configuration was locked to a default set of parameters that limited the scope of configuration and compatibility available.
VMware has smartly identified the lack of configurability as a point of contention within vCloud Director, and vCloud Director 9.7 now allows users to further adjust their IPsec VPN configurations to better support current standards (such as enabling IKEv2 and choosing to use route or policy-based tunnels).
HTML5 is king
The HTML5-based tenant portal is now the primary user interface in vCloud Director 9.7. The original FLEX UI is now deprecated. All customers are advised to use the tenant portal going forward, as VMware will permanently remove access to the FLEX UI in an upcoming release.
Maintenance scheduling progress
Maintenance schedules are currently being finalized for each Managed VMware Cloud location. Customers will be contacted as soon as they are approved. If you need assistance accessing the tenant portal in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your account rep or our support team.
