What is Bandwidth Throttling in vCloud Availability 3.5.1

VMware has just released the VMware Cloud Director Availability 3.5.1 (as of 20/02/2020), in this release, it covers security enhancements, bug fixes, and UI updates. Check out the release notes for more information.

In vCloud Availability 3.5.1, as a Cloud Provider administrator, we can configure the bandwidth throttling to set a global transfer rate (measured in megabits per second) limit for the total combined incoming replication traffic from all sites to all local vCloud Availability Cloud Replicator Appliance nodes.

As what is explained in VMware official documentation here, throttling the network bandwidth used by vCloud Availability avoids the network saturation and prevents the overloading of the management connections with the replication data traffic that shares the network infrastructure.

The global traffic limit operates with any number of vCloud Availability Cloud Replicator Appliancenodes. The number of data connections or the activity within the connections has no effect on the bandwidth throttling.

How to configure bandwidth throttling

Prerequisites

Please refer to the VMware official documentation here.

  • Verify that vCloud Availability 3.5.1 is deployed.

Check the version of your vCloud Availability Cloud Replication Management Appliance, you need to install or upgrade to the 3.5.1 version.

vCAV Portal version

Verify the version of your vCloud Availability Cloud Tunnel in the Cloud:

Tunnel Version

  • Verify that you can access vCloud Availability as a tenant or as a service provider.

Procedure

  1. In the left pane, click Configuration.
  2. Under Traffic settings next to Bandwidth throttling, click Edit.traffic settings
  3. In the Bandwidth throttling window, configure the traffic settings.
    1. To enable bandwidth throttling, select the Limit all incoming traffic radio button.
    2. In the Maximum mbit/s text box, enter a numerical value for the replication traffic limit in megabits per second.
    3. To save the settings, click Apply.bandwidth throttling

P.S: in VCDA 4.0 provider can specify which tunnel network interface this setting will apply to.

Throttling

Monitor the traffic

In a cloud site, you can monitor the traffic for every replication in all directions and you can also monitor the traffic for every organization.

Tenant can see their per-VM traffic in vCloud Director’s vCAV GUI.

before setting 1

Cloud Administrator can retrieve recorded per-VM traffic information in vCloud Availability Provider Portal GUI.

per-VM

Cloud Administrator can also retrieve per-tenant traffic data chart in the same GUI.

tenant traffic

Throttling the global network bandwidth only applies to the inbound replication data traffic without affecting other types of network traffic like data and management, this is a very nice feature for cloud providers who want to offer true DRaaS solution while maintaining their operational efficiency.