In addition to our in-house virtual routers (see Virtual Firewall Comparison), Green Cloud also allows partners to deploy BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) virtual Firewalls in their VMware Cloud Director VDC (Virtual Data Center) environment, but only if they support the necessary features in the underlying hypervisor. In this article, we look at why the SonicWall NSv series is not compatible with Cloud Director.
vMotion Support
According to the SonicWall NSv FAQ, the NSv appliance does not support vMotion. Green Cloud utilizes VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to balance our infrastructure. This means DRS will leverage vMotion to move workloads around to keep the infrastructure based on the resource demand. When this occurs to SonicWall devices, we find the VM frequently does not come back online as intended, which is not operationally viable for a 100% uptime guarantee. Due to this feature not being supported on the NSv, Green Cloud does not support the SonicWall NSv series in our IaaS multi-tenant environment powered by VMware Cloud Director.