vCloud Director Reviews

The most valuable features of course is resiliency between data centers and within the data center and application availability for our enterprise environments and also to help our business be a leader in our industry which has helped us for growth based on our quality of infrastructure.

Really the benefits of a vCloud Director are for our developers to have a straight line to be able to provision resources and help the business move along on new platforms and provision things rapidly for the business without allowing them to have full control to move those environments into production.

Really what I would like to see is some of the capabilities from like IBM XIV to where essentially VMware could mask physical CPUs from certain virtual machines so that in the instances like Oracle where we could save on licensing and not have to cover licensing across unused resources. For me, I think it would be great eventually in the future for VMware to have that capability to mask CPU and coordinate with Oracle to where smaller businesses who don't have enterprise license agreements to cover any and all CPUs to be able to license these assets and not have to carve out physical resources just for work or workloads or any other type of virtual work clause that depend on CPU counts within physical resources.

Our primary platform is vSphere, everything is licensed on enterprise plus. We also run vCloud Director in our development environment that we eventually want to spread for automation and to our production environments as well. I'm also here to look into the vRealize Suite to eventually upgrade those environments to the latest platforms.

Stability in solutions is fantastic. In the life cycles that we've had all the products, we've maybe had some hiccups here and there only on the hardware side. Of course, within any large enterprise environment, there's always some hiccups but even with those the HA failures that we've had, the recovery time within the application platforms has been fantastic and that's been reported up to the CIO and up to the CEO of the company. They have visibility to that and that's why they love the product features of vSphere.

The scalability is fantastic as well. We're a Dell customer so within our environments, we actually use Dell Blades. On that platform, we're able to scale out rapidly within our clusters and provision new resources really within a matter of days or if we have hardware onsite, it's a matter of minutes.

I got to be honest from my side as a vExpert, I handle a lot of front-line, high level cases that may happen. I have a good group of Engineers that I work with, that I help train on VMware to be able to handle any issues that come up. Issues really don't happen very often because we do invest in a lot of tools to help us in the environment in case there's any issues. Support has been great. They're very good at communicating back and forth with the VMware support and also any of the third party plugins that we have between hardware solutions and software solutions, all of them are great with coordinating with VMware support.

VMware's been the market leader in the virtualization segment for many, many years. I've worked with the product since 1.0 days and I've seen the evolution of the other hypervisors as well but none have totally matched the enterprise quality that VMware has.

Peer reviews are important but hands on with the products and doing POCs are very important as well. Really, I think from my standpoint, the peer reviews help to focus on needs for a particular enterprise environment or particular solution and I think it helps weigh out what features may not be necessarily needed for particular solution. Really, peer reviews I think are fantastic. I do them all the time but that depends on use case what you need them for.

We are a service partner that offers cloud services based on Cloud Director.

One valuable feature is the true multitenancy capabilities for the core infrastructure service that Cloud Director provides.

Cloud Director has room for improvement in many areas. One critical thing that comes to mind is the hyperscalers. They could be more seamlessly integrated into the hybrid cloud. Cloud Director should be capable of hooking up with those. For example, they recently started allowing customers to perform S3 integrations with Cloud Director. So a customer can integrate his S3 buckets from AWS with the Cloud Director. Okay, fine. But what about Azure? There should be more integration capabilities. 

Secondly, VMware has made some progress in terms of balancers, but I think it needs a little more refinement and flexibility. This is not limited to just the VMware marketplace. More flexibility will make it easier for any service provider to leverage and monetize them.

Last but not least, from a networking and monitoring perspective, there should be a little more native monitoring capabilities, especially metering capability. Metering is one of the areas where I find Cloud Director leaves much to be desired. VMware can do more to make it a much more metered product.

Cloud Director's out-of-the-box capabilities should be good enough that you don't have to look for a third-party product to give you those capabilities. Networking-wise, I think it's good. Still, I think the networking capabilities are not fully realized on Cloud Director.  VMware should do a little more work to reveal all of the capabilities through Cloud Director rather than just at the back of Cloud Director. You've got to have those features exposed to customers as a self-service rather than managed service.

I've been using Cloud Director since 2012.

Scalability is a word you have to look at from different perspectives. I think some of the capabilities they have introduced in terms of load balancing deliver out-of-the-box scalability for tenants. But as a product itself, Cloud Director needs more multi-site capabilities. I have seen some work being done but that's just a start, I would say.

My experience with VMware support has been mixed. Sometimes you get fantastic support. The techs are really knowledgeable and know what they're talking about. But then there are certain times where I have seen some things that affect the client as well. So I think VMware support has some room for improvement. They can do much better. VMware as a brand definitely can do better in terms of response times and capabilities. 

The Cloud Director setup has improved tremendously compared to where it started. I have seen how complex it used to be. Now, it has become easy and robust. The setup is more straightforward and seamless than before. 

In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly.

I rate Cloud Director eight out of 10. As a service provider, we have to look at a couple of available and other things, so I would rate it around eight. I have to deduct two points because some small things make a huge difference to a service provider, but they might not matter too much from a customer-experience perspective. 

This is the go-to tool for anyone looking for standard out-of-the-box capabilities in a fully multitenant public cloud software that they can leverage to offer services to their customers. It's also good for enterprises that want to keep a more segregated approach to their different departments and things. You definitely have much better control and a more streamlined way to offer services to your internal teams or your customers out-of-the-box in a multitenant way. And you don't need to worry too much about how you're going to network these things together or how you're going to control the assets of the computers and resources. 

In my experience, it is a very robust product. I have used this product since the initial version and watched it evolve into a highly mature product. It's a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

We using it for the public cloud.

The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it.

We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features.

vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync.

It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions. However, we are managing it.

The scalability works as it should.

The technical support could be better. We managing with the current support though.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup is complex as we have our own customized portals which we integrated with the product. It's quite a complex solution.

We did the deployment in-house.

The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions.

Do a proof a concept before making a decision.

Our primary use case for this solution is to onboard multiple customers into a multi-tenant platform.

My company's a traditional hardware reseller so moving into a subscription-based model is challenging from a sales perspective. It's a new way of getting customers in and getting them tightly coupled with my company.

The self-service capabilities have affected the way that our customers can now do their own thing. Whereas in our old legacy platform, we had to sit down and do stuff for our customers. We don't require as many people to maintain the platform. 

It has also enabled us to provision new clients faster. We can provision a new customer in a few hours and they will be up and running. 

The multi-tenancy feature is very important for us from a service perspective. The recent new capabilities are a huge step forward for this product.

The data protection, disaster recovery, and container features are limited but evolving as well. We use some third party products for data protection and disaster recovery.

I would like to see a full transition to NSX-T, more work on the container, and double integration.

The stability is rock solid. 

We're still a small, newly started service provider so we haven't had a lot of scale yet. 

Their technical support is very good compared to other vendors. 

The main reason that we switched solutions was that we were running a legacy based infrastructure as a service. Customers had to submit a ticket and then we did something in the background for the customer. They requested self-service capabilities, so that was the main reason we knew it was time to switch.

The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better.

I implemented it myself. I designed and deployed the solution myself because I have a long background with VMware. We haven't used any external companies for implementation.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to get people who understand the technology and what you can do with it to get the program right the first time. You can make a lot of mistakes during the deployment. Get someone in there to help you if you don't understand the product 100 percent. 

I rated this solution an eight. I believe that everything has room for improvement and wouldn't give any solution a ten. 

We only looked at VMware. We looked at alternatives like OnApp but we saw that VMware was moving forward with a lot of innovation on the vCloud Director and stuck to that. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for infrastructure as a service, which is pretty much a self service, together with a period of management if the customer needs. We are partners with vCloud Director and I'm the manager of virtualization, storage and backup.

As a service provider, it is key for us to have control over the overall cost of ownership, as well as providing benefits, good service and making a profit. With the help of vCloud Director, we have been able to provide really good multi-tenanted services, making the best use of existing hardware and investments, but reducing our overall CapEx very heavily. As an organization, it has really helped us to sustain a service and continues to help us leave a mark on the market.

I think it's a wonderful product. I like the latest features of extensibility, which allows integration of other services and enables us to go beyond infrastructure as a service. We are now in a position where we can also offer platform as a service to our customers. That's a really wonderful feature. Extensibility allows service providers to extend their existing services and integrate them within the vCloud, offering a feature with an overall solution to customers. 

One of the elements lacking in the product is integration with the hyperscalers. Using hybrid cloud requires connectivity to other public clouds like Azure or AWS. At the moment that is not possible. If that can be made available as a feature, I think vCloud would become a one-stop shop for everything. We would be able to give a true hybrid service from a single pane of glass, offer everything from a single portal. It becomes a cloud management platform rather than just a simple IaaS natively from VMware. 

Additional features I'd like to see would be flexibility in terms of user permissions rules. I'd also like to see the capability to integrate on-prem dedicated virtual centers within vCloud. There is a CPOM feature which enables integration on-prem with the existing customer into the same portal. At the moment it is very limited, just providing a view. It would be good if we had the capability to make changes from the same portal. Multi-site capabilities would be another additional feature. It is offered but there is room for improvement in terms of other features and functionalities that can be brought in, which would make it more seamless. 

The dashboard for monitoring is very limited and it's not provided out of the box. It's done using a different tool from VMware itself. Having those rich dashboards within the portal itself, directly providing monitoring of the virtual machines, would be great. That is something which is really missing. Performance metrics were completely missing till now. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

The solution is quite stable now, a lot better than it used to be. There are certain issues in terms of making changes at the backend but I have seen a big improvement from previous versions.

Scalability as an option was not available earlier. It's possible now but still needs some improvement. We have 300-plus customers and around 10,000-plus virtual machines being hosted. This solution is our main cloud portfolio offering so we use it on a regular basis.

I think we have had fantastic support from VMware. We don't use them very often now because it is quite a stable product. They have very knowledgeable support staff. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward with the new enhancements. It could be improved in terms of how the database's high availability is taken into account. They can still streamline the installation process but compared to when it was launched, it's much better now. With the recent availability of cloud provider hub and cloud foundation, I think deployment can be very easily done within a couple of days and that includes all the planning. 

As a service provider, it gives us quite good leverage and flexibility to present our own pricing and create pricing policies, which is really good. 

It's important to have some development capabilities within your organization I think the most important thing is to understand your requirements and what your end goal is because you need to understand whether vCloud Director is going to restrict you or not. It's a very powerful product for service providers. You also need to keep in mind what other service add-ons you want to achieve because your overall design and architecture or blueprint is very dependent on what you want to do. Having a blueprint will provide you with the difference between a wonderful outcome or an unstable one. We've been using this solution a long time so I would suggest that if you want to be in the current market scenario and keep yourself alive, a product like vCloud Director can definitely help you sustain yourself. It keeps you up with the new trends and up to date on your portfolios as well. The fact that we can now go beyond infrastructure as a service is great. We can now expand and be a more versatile provider giving application as a service from a single portal. 

In today's scenario, hybrid cloud and hybrid connectivity is what is really very important. Although Cloud Director provides that sort of connectivity, it is limited within VMware products. If we could hook up with hyperscalers like Azure, Google or AWS, I would give this solution a higher rating.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We use it in a new data center. 

The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud Director. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice.

In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version.

The stability is good.

The scalability is the best part.

Our customer wanted to deliver a host and new services. We discussed what would be good solution and thought that vCloud Director would work.

It has enabled us to provision new clients faster. We don't have to configure a new host nor configure a new VM. We just have to secure it.

It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost.

I would recommend, especially with the new features coming out in versions 8.0 and 9.0.