vCloud Director Room for Improvement

Tim  Abboud - PeerSpot reviewer
Key Account Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

All products have issues. Perhaps the update process. We sometimes face problems, but I don't know if it's our plan or the product itself.

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Tek Kee Wang - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Advisor at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

As my company started off with the product a few months ago, we have not faced any issues and are still exploring the tool's functionalities.

The interface of the product is okay. Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required. My company is still exploring the aforementioned area of the product. I feel the product is continuously evolving.

I can't comment on whether VMware needs to focus on marketing efforts to promote its products since it is in the transition phase after Broadcom purchased it. My company is waiting to see what is going to happen next. VMware purchases Broadcom, and I don't know if, under the new management, the changes that will be made are going to be beneficial to customers or not, so it depends on how Broadcom is going to play the game.

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MB
Head of Transport & Data Networks Engineering Department at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Over the past two years, VMware transitioned from vSphere 6.3 to 2016, which presented challenges for us. The migration from VTT was particularly difficult, prompting us to reconsider the solution's architecture. VMware occasionally makes decisions that impact customers and alter workflow, necessitating adjustments to features and processes. 

It would be beneficial if VMware maintained greater backward compatibility in their technology upgrades, ensuring smoother transitions and minimizing disruptions for users. It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security. While such options exist, they are inadequately documented, requiring experimentation with uncertain outcomes. We seek clearer documentation and smoother integration processes to minimize risks and ensure functionality when incorporating third-party solutions.

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Buyer's Guide
vCloud Director
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about vCloud Director. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
BC
Assistant Manager at Melco Resorts & Entertainment

The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive.

So, there is room for improvement in terms of pricing. 

Another thing that could be improved is the support. Sometimes, the response takes a long time, and the advice they provide could be better.

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Shahadat Hossain Shipon - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Beximco Computers Ltd.

The blueprint that allows customers to create their own images for deployment services needs some improvement. 

The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated. Currently, the solution only offers this option for their own VMware. Other products like Red Hat allow you to automate anything. 

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AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack. 

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SA
CIO at airtel

vCloud Director should focus on helping customers sustain their private clouds and scale out when necessary.

The solution has some basic functionalities and a few functional services. They are working to orchestrate between public and private clouds. While this is good, I think they need to enable private clouds to ensure that they are competing in the market of public clouds. For us, the cost of a public cloud is seven times more expensive than what we build and consume. 

They also should consider bringing in significant upgrades like SNS features. Database services need to go beyond what they are currently doing.

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AD
Support Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

There is some room for improvement in vCloud Director, particularly with its integration with various VMware components for automation. It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns. Specifically, having native automation capabilities within vCloud Director would be a great enhancement.

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VarunSidana - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Team Lead at Golf Business Machine

What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. Currently, it is not connected with the core network devices, for example, Palo Alto or any firewall used in the company. Though there is good integration with NSX, some of the customers don't use NSX. There should be a good amount of integration between vCloud Director and the other network providers, because if there's search integration, then things will become more automated and it'll be more tightly integrated with everything.

What vCloud Director needs is a more simplified installation, because the process is a little bit complicated, compared to installing vRealize Automation or the set of vRealize solutions. They're much easier to deploy than vCloud Director.

Making the installation automated is an additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution. Now that VMware VCF is there, they have the automation layer ready. If any company or organization is planning to deploy vCloud Director, they will start from scratch. They will start from the hardware level itself. If they a tie-up with Dell or HP and from the server level itself, if they can start deploying with vCloud Director by following the best practices and verified architecture, then it makes sense.

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PP
Architect Product Engineering at SunGard Availability Services

The integration between components could be improved. The cloud solution does not comprise a single product. If you look at Azure or AWS, they have tightly integrated all the components in the backend, and they just provide a UI. With VMware, we just have to integrate all products of VMware together and then provide a UI to the customer. 

If some component of the UI isn't working, in the backend we have to find out, is this vCloud availability the problem? Or is RabbitMQ the problem? This kind of integration is supposed to be done by the service provider, but the integration should be pretty tight between all the components, which form a private cloud.

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Roberto Cardenas - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at Licencias OnLine

The product installation process could be easier for new users as well. 

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AE
Technical Team Leader - Microsoft at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

The solution's installation is difficult, and you need somebody with the solution's knowledge to do the installation.

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Martin Helms - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO & Owner at Rackhosting

vCloud Director should include better billing options for businesses like mine or more options for customers to see their usage and billing situation regarding the usage of vCloud Director. vCloud Director's graphical user interface should be made easier.

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Søren O. Bendtsen - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Manager - Private Cloud Platform & Storage at ITM8

It would be great if Microsoft and VMware come together and become a common tool. 

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Mohamed-Lotfy - PeerSpot reviewer
L2 Cloud Ops Engineer at Orange

We get too many errors, whether it's the URL not working or errors in some of the UI features. I think it needs to be more stable.

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CM
Pre-Sales Engineer at Secura

I've seen that there are more HTML5 bits coming in. With that, it's exposing more of the NSX. So, if they keep going in the same direction where they give more features under the hood in vSphere to be exposed to the vCloud Director, that would be great. The bits they've done so far as we've been going forward into the vSphere 6.5 have been good. I would like them to just keep doing what they are doing going forward.

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HB
Cloud Administrator at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster. The solution should also improve their documentation.

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Maxim-Chepukov - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at IOTANS

We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve.

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KF
Divisional Engineer at National Telecom Corporatio

We are a service provider, and every day, new customers come to us needing advanced features like platform features. For example, some of them need a managed hosting setup like Beanstalk, or some of them need microservices, like container or Kubernetes, or serverless types of things. So we are in discussions with the concerned teams at VMware in order to incorporate the platform services for next year.

There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products. We are not happy with the frequent upgrades. Because we are a government department, we find it quite difficult to accommodate the frequent changes. What we would like is for the changes to be less frequent, at least twice a year or once a year, so that we can accommodate that in our budget plans. We make budgets annually, not quarterly. I think they need to have a better roadmap for future offerings and future technologies.

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AB
Computer Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve.

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Ignacio Duarte - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Pyxis

The tool needs to add more features to improve the console. 

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AnkurGupta1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Consultan at HCL Technologies

vCloud Director should improve by having support with other cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google cloud.

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RV
Director at Silicon Sky Consulting LLC

The first thing that I would say if someone asked me for what nice feature I would like to see, it would be a billing feature. To be able to automate our billing for clients would be a nice feature for us and save us a lot of time.  

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RA
OS & Servers Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

In the virtualization aspect, we are happy, but if we work on the public cloud, not the private cloud.OpenStack has a lot of features. In OpenShift when you configure it you can provide 100 web service in redundancy mode. 

This is very simple in OpenShift. We are happy with vCloud in terms of the virtualization but not for redundancy and distribution.

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JD
OSS Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

 I would like to see Business recovery and integration with SD-WAN.

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AS
System Administrator at Bezeq

We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product.

We are also looking for upgraded VMware environments to the latest versions.

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IS
Engineer at T-Systems

I would like to be able to search in vCloud Director more easily. If I just need to look for something quickly, it's quite difficult to find it with the way it's set up now. They should make the search button better.

The option to build up vCloud Director on the flash is quite annoying because you need to have integrated the flash, which can be problematic with the processor. Finding the integration plugin which works with the processor and which works with the flash is hard. I think this is an important feature to redesign. Eliminating the integration plugin would make it much better.

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VB
Senior Professional Services Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

There is no support for versions below 10.x. Support for previous versions would be nice, but it's the end of support which is the company policy. We cannot debate it and they provide us with extended support as well, for a year.

This is is more than enough time for an organization to upgrade to the latest version to be secure and protected.

There is always room for improvement.

In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced.

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SB
Senior Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

We would like to see them up the storage. 

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it_user669336 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company

This is pure IaaS cloud backend software with absolutely no additional services which are offered by Amazon and Microsoft today. Lacking additional services reduces the level of cloud integration companies just love with Amazon and Azure.

To go into more detail:

vCloud Director is the alternative to Amazon EC2 and that's it. However,
Amazon AWS offers approx. 50 other services such as S3, Glacier, RDS,
Lambda, Workspaces, Elastic Beanstalk, RedShift, X-Ray, etc. Compare it to VMware Cloud Platform and you will quickly see how many services VMware doesn't offer today.

Customers require tight integration of different platforms provided by a single vendor in order to increase performance of their environment and drive down TCO. VMware still doesn't have cloud offering that compares to Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.


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it_user8685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com)

FT capacity issues are resolved now in vSphere 6.0. Cheers!!

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it_user335202 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Enterprise Systems Architect at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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AY
Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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TT
Senior Solution Specialist with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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HS
Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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AY
Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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. 

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DB
Solutions Engineer at NTT Com MS

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.

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it_user334515 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

I don’t see any improvements that could be made based on the way we use it. Maybe some built-in third-party tools that we’re using now in terms of automation (i.e. Bamboo) would be an improvement.

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DR
Java Developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions.

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AA
VMware Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see automation for creating data centers and IP management. That would make it easier for customers.

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it_user6696 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is not targeted to smaller and midsize companies. Pricing can be beyond their budgets. View full review »
WB
MSS Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis.

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it_user320277 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtual Systems Administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Better GUI as they don’t hold with the programs that well. Better user interfaces in general. Both the administrative and user interfaces need to be better.

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it_user297132 - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Cloud Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Though the product is quite good, I feel it needs a more public view, where the server access studies to migrate organizations into cloud be clearer. Also, orchestrator should be API based, and have templates to use instead of having to create the Java scripting from scratch. It also needs to be more independent of the platform on which it is used on.

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it_user320640 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I feel like vCloud is two years behind the feature set – in terms of the UI, and vCenter. I can't do the same tasks that I can do in terms of UI as with vCenter.

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JA
ICT specialist

If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features.

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it_user6144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
+ Platform maturity and interoperability required View full review »
SR
Senior Project Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI. 

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Buyer's Guide
vCloud Director
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about vCloud Director. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.