What’s New in the Green House Data Cloud?

Here at Green House Data, our technicians are constantly working hard behind the scenes to improve the customer experience in our cloud products. We’ve recently completed a round of upgrades to bring you the latest features and bug fixes to our gBlock Cloud platform. Here are some of the newest features that are available to you today:

HTML5 Remote Console

vCloud Director now has a HTML5-based remote console to replace the old browser plugin. This allows for quicker access to your virtual machines from any modern browser. It also offers better performance and brings new features such as a virtual mouse trackpad.

Note: The main web interface is still flash based and requires Adobe Flash Player version 11.2 or later.

Improved Browser Support

Back in 2015, Google Chrome removed support for NPAPI plugins. This had the unfortunate side effect of breaking the Remote Console plugin that vCloud Director uses for console access to your virtual machines. Now with the new HTML5 implementation, consoles are once again working in Chrome.

VMware has also been working on improving compatibility and performance across all browsers. Below are the currently supported browsers for vCloud 8.10:

Platform Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox Internet Explorer Windows Server 2003/2008 Yes Yes 10.x, 11.x Windows 7/8/10 Yes Yes 10.x, 11.x Mac OS X Yes Yes n/a Linux Yes Yes n/a

Affinity Rules

The new version of vCloud Director also brings us Affinity and Anti-Affinity rules. These allow you to define whether you want your VMs grouped together on a single compute host, or kept apart on separate hosts.

Affinity Rules – Attempts to keep two or more virtual machines on a single physical compute host. This is often used when peak performance and the lowest possible latency is needed between two virtual machines. For example, when using a high amount of transactions between an application server and its database server.

Anti-Affinity Rules – Attempts to keep two or more virtual machines on different compute hosts. This is commonly used when working with highly available or clustered virtual machines, so that in the event of a single physical host failure, the remaining virtual machine(s) are unaffected and remain online.

It’s important to note that these rules are only a “best effort” attempt, and depending on the workload of the cloud environment they may not be honored.