Many times, customers' licenses are not used because the client is not aware of the features and the product benefits. When somebody is buying a product, they just do a default configuration.

Then, a really qualified person will do an assessment of existing stuff and realize that 60% of products are not well configured, and some licenses are not used. The client will be struggling because the benefit they want to achieve out of these automations isn't achieved to the maximum. 

I think an organization should be in a discovery session to look at what is unused because Microsoft offers a lot of things. If someone has too many unused licenses, why don't they move to the cloud and optimize the cost? Microsoft is proactive to help large customers reduce cost. In the case of vCenter, those initiatives are not there.

We are looking for more consolidation on optimization through VMware. We are dependent on directly working with VMware because the product launch and product knowledge within the companies are limited within the day-to-day operation.

For example, we work with Dell. Dell is selling VMware and other products. Dell has given us dedicated resources in our office. I'm not sure if there's an agreement VMware has done with customers to start giving free consulting, advising, and solution support – at least for large customers – so that the virtual landscape is more optimized and scalable.

When I speak with various other people who have legacy knowledge of VMware on-premises, they are not spending time learning about the products and the enhancements VMware is doing. They don't really have the understanding of how VMware can help to have a virtual firewall, the vCenter on-premises server being moved to the cloud, and the cloud being moved to on-premises. VMware has a product that can enable me to have on-premises storage, replicated to cloud, and then cloud being replicated to on-premises through vCenter.

This becomes very challenging because if I propose anything as the enterprise architect, I cannot have a sign off until my delivery gives a sign off. If they have not experienced this, they're dependent on third parties to do so. These are some of the gaps I see: knowledge, product knowledge, use cases, and pre POC.

There are some update-related issues with the product. The tool's updates are released on time, so there was continuous improvement from vCenter's end. The product also has an extended community and forums with questions and answers.

The migration from site-to-site needs to be improved.

It should be easier to automate tasks in bulk, such as instantiating several VMs.

I would like to be able to automate RDMs for clusters.

This solution needs to have more built-in workflows.

I've worked with the solution for only one year and am still working on learning the solution. I haven't experienced the solution fully and need to explore more virtualization. 

Our senior management has plans to migrate, and I'm in the middle of deployment with a VMware platform with plans to move to OpenStack.

I cannot speak to any missing features.

I would like to see more automation added in the future. This could help resolve management and provisioning tasks. 

I would like to have an interface that can manage both on-premises and cloud solutions from a single console, where we can easily manage the resources that are being used or at least applications. Whereby clicking here and there from on-premises to cloud, or cloud to on-premises, depending on the requirements. If that can be accomplished, it will be extremely beneficial.

We encounter challenges related to the renewal of support subscriptions. Their technical support team reports the queries within an hour or two, according to SLA. However, they take six hours or even the next business day to resolve the issues.

If you ask me, I believe vCenter Orchestrator should be part of VMware vSphere's basic bundle. As a product, vCenter Orchestrator should not be licensed at all because the world has progressed way beyond what it can offer. Although VMware has a lot of licensing models and benefits from the licensing part, I think vCenter Orchestrator should be the core component of VMware ESXi. If one looks at the hypervisors or other products compared to vCenter Orchestrator, like Hyper-V, then one can see how other products offer the virtualization manager for free. I am not talking about the overall situation an enterprise faces, but I feel it should be free for VMware ESXi users. VMware has its own stack to build on top of vCenter Orchestrator, and when it comes to BDC, having vRealize stack or suite in position is the area that provides VMware an edge over its competitors. Tanzu is also getting in the line for its use of components.

The scalability option provided by the solution is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

In future product releases, my company expects the solution to be made more feasible enough to be used with different hardware products.

The automation and pricing are areas of concern where improvements are required, especially after Broadcom acquired VMware, so the hot topic in the market revolves around the licensing cause attached to the product.

VMware tools would benefit from more automation. When installing our devices and servers, we often need to install the VMware tools manually. This process should be automated during the VM installation process.

The solution could be integrated with third-party hypervisors.

The solution's analytics feature could be better.

I believe a transparent view and better terms of condition between Oracle and vCenter Orchestrator would be helpful.

I have seen vCenter Orchestrator evolving a lot over the years, making it quite handy. I don't see any areas for improvement in the product. It has already improved a lot over the years.

The product lacks GUIs. The tool should have more GUIs available, along with easier product documentation.

There are a few areas that could use improvement. Firstly, the pricing could be more competitive. Secondly, we would like more flexibility in sizing data storage and virtual machines, as the current options aren't very adaptable. The management of vCenter could be less automatic and more transparent for our experienced technicians. Lastly, our data stores could be better integrated with third-party options, as they don't fully meet our high-end requirements. vCenter has limited management capabilities, causing problems when you have plenty of space and memory but can't monitor their usage well. The main issues revolve around data storage and management, driven by an overly automatic and simplistic approach that is not ideal for complex or expanding setups.

vCenter Orchestrator's debugging capacity could be improved. In the next release, vCenter Orchestrator should include self-healing capabilities and clustering.

It is practically difficult at this stage to really comment on the improvisations of V central. But more tech events and PoC cases would help the EA to design better solutions and utilization.

As a customer and a DC Architect, it would be great if more self-learning resources are made available online. One on one sessions from VM ware for rapidly growing organizations like us will further strengthen the intent of embracing the product portfolio from VMWare. A couple of the pointer in this regards can be as below: 

1. Quarterly technology reviews from the OEM.

2. Consultation and handholding

3. Opex Model

A feature to review and setup tasks should be added. 

The solution's price could be cheaper. 

The response time of vCenter Orchestrator's support could be improved. You're good when you get a knowledgeable person who knows things, but their response time is slow.

The licensing cost could be reduced, it's quite expensive. 

Storage has room for improvement. It's a big problem for our solution. The interface also needs improvement, it should be simplified.   

They should integrate more storage systems for the replication. There should be an integrated replication tool. We have two sites and we want to have the data between the sites and all the data replicated. There is no ability to do that now. You have to buy this ability from another vendor.

It's very expensive. The quality of the product is fine, it's good quality but the price is very high.

In the next release, they should have better data synchronization between different brands and hardware so that you can replicate two data stores. VMware should maintain decent replication. There's no synchronization between VMware and different brands. For example, one installment from Dell and one installment from HP should be able to synchronize their data.

The product’s cost needs improvement. Not all organizations can spend huge amounts of money to orchestrate the operation. In comparison, KVM is less expensive and has similar functionality. It could be integrated with other products and technologies than VMware.

The snapshot technology of VMware is not good compared to other solutions in the market, like Nutanix. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

The product is not quite easy to use and needs improvement in that regard.

When the SSO certificate needs to be renewed, the upgrading and testing are quite complicated. We faced this issue just three months ago.

The price of this product is high and could be improved.

On the KVM side, we really don't have anything. There we have a gap. It's a very small deployment on the KVM side, however, it would be ideal if we were able to properly use all the resources and get the full performance of the platform. 

On the orchestration side, we're lacking the KVM part as well.

There can be compatibility issues. We need to keep track of different versions of the software. For example, we're still on E6 I6 6.5. In some cases, we can't upgrade to Red Hat 8 yet, for compatibility reasons. Every time we do, we have to be applying HPE firmware and stuff. Sometimes we run into complications and we have to stage everything in the lab just to make sure all the versions are compatible. There's this forward and backward compatibility of different software you need to constantly be aware of. 

In the last few months, I've heard rumors that ransomware has been gaining the ability to attack VMware, which has us worried. 

The cost of the solution is high.

It is too expensive. One of the main issues is the price. 

I don't know if vCenter Orchestrator can automize the provisioning of other products and other virtualizing software besides for VMware. If it will develop the ability to be a multi-provider product it will be better for VMware.

I would it to become multi-platforming, like what vRealize does. 

There are no good manuals or guidelines on integrations. Hence, you need to be asking someone. 

I think that vSAN can be improved.

The GUI should be enhanced in the future. 

The solution needs to integrate with Cloud facilities like AWS and Azure. Containerization, which I believe they are working on, needs to improve too.

I would like to see, from within the Web Console, being able to define the project and custom templates per user; almost like how CloudSpec has approached the solution.

The interface could be improved to bring greater user-friendliness and ease of use.

I liked the previous client better than the current web client of vCenter Orchestrator, though my colleagues like the client now. Getting used to the current web client was difficult because it was different from the old client, though this is my personal opinion.

The technical support for vCenter Orchestrator needs improvement.

I would like to see better performance. 

Using this solution requires a lot of experience.

We haven't gotten to that level of usage yet as to be able to see the downsides. The solution has been able to handle our basic requirements at this point. Maybe in a year, when the team has used the solution extensively, we would be able to actually see the drawbacks, especially those of us who are trying to compare it with other solutions as well.

As we work towards more stability on the solution, sometimes we'll try something and it breaks and it's easier to restart the service. That's the only drawback. We've experienced this with other applications as well. 

It would be great if the solution could further integrate with other services. it would be really good to have all of the solutions in one particular dashboard or one particular installed package. Right now, you can do that from other products, but we have to orchestrate it or have it as a subset. It would be great to actually have all the features bond together, especially for SMBs. It would be really cost-effective in the end.

The custom workflows are very difficult and confusing.

The IDE for developing is not user-friendly and does not have IntelliSense for checking your code. I find this to be very challenging.

It would be nice if the IDE accommodated all of the languages because right now, it only has JavaScript. More options for scripting are needed, such as C# and Acorn.

I would like to see the creation of video tutorials to help learn how to use particular functions of the product.

The licensing is expensive and should be improved.

The UI should be more simplified so that fewer tech users are required.

The workflow can be complicated. I would like a simpler workflow, and I would like it to be more friendly to use.

In the next release, to make it easier to write the workflows, I would l like to see more HTML GUIs.

The solution could be a little bit less expensive. It used to be cheaper, but now it is very costly and the license model counts by the processor. The currency conversion rate in Egypt is very high, and a couple of thousand dollars means here a lot of money to us here.

Mainly VMware integrates with other products, but there is no easy way to link with other products from a different vendor. We can integrate with other products from the same vendors fairly well, but if they could make it so integration is easier with other vendors, that would really help.

VMware continues to improve its product, and we find a lot of new features that have improved over the years. I would like to see a greater ability to do mobile administration.