It was in March 2019, that we came up with our first release and on this day, the integrations team at Cohesity is proud to host over 18 major, minor or patch versions, the latest at the time of writing being v1.5.0.
We developed our VCD extension to deliver Cloud services (IaaS in this case) with self-service on top of the customer’s VMware infrastructure. We aimed to make our customer’s experience seamless by providing a single interface for managing all backup and recovery tasks along with their other IaaS tasks. More and more adoption of our plugin and continuous feedback from our customers keeps us motivated to push more features in this extension and make things even more convenient for them. Today, in this blog, I am super excited to share with you some of the significant features which we have rolled over this period.
Monitoring improvements
When we started, our monitoring capabilities were limited to on-demand backups and recoveries. Scheduled backup reports were not available through the extension. We have now added support for monitoring the status of scheduled backups as well. Tenant users can now follow all backup runs (scheduled/on-demand) and recovery tasks (vm/vApp/files or folders) through the monitoring section. Reports are available for the last seven days.
File/Folder Download
We now allow tenant users to download files or folders directly through the extension. They can now search and select multiple files or folders, add them to a cart and instantly download them without logging in the Cohesity cluster. This feature is available in the ‘Restore File or Folder’ workflow.
Restore VM to alternate locations with support for storage profiles
VCD recognizes storage profiles rather than vSphere datastores. A tenant user may not have information about their datastores at all, and so it made less sense asking them to select one when they initiate a recovery task. With our extension, we now provide tenant users with the ability to select the target storage profile during recovery to an alternate location.
File Recovery using hypervisor APIs
Earlier file/folder recovery carried through the extension used the ‘Agent-Based’ recovery process. Cohesity pushed the executables through VMware tools and then launched it in the guest OS to initiate file recovery. In the new extension, we have introduced the recovery method ‘Use VMware Tools’. With this option selected, Cohesity pushes files and folders using the VMware hypervisor APIs to target VM.
Use of Tenant Credentials during Tenant Mapping
There is a significant change in the configuration and the tenant mapping workflow as well. Service providers now need to configure mapping with tenant service user credentials. With this approach, we have moved away from using the cluster-admin credentials and impersonation headers for API invocations making the plugin more secure.
What’s Else!
Upgrade to the latest version of Cohesity VMware Cloud Director extension to access these new capabilities & bug fixes. Binaries are available here. You can also visit the Cohesity Developer portal and the VCD landing page to know more about VMware Cloud Director extension.
We’re committed to making your backup & recovery experience even better. We have a lot more features like ‘ability to cross launch to Cohesity UI’. We would love to hear from you. Please provide us write to us at cohesity-api-sdks@cohesity.com
