vCloud Director Reviews

We are a service provider. We offer business integration, application and infrastructure outsourcing, innovative solutions and strategic consultancy to private businesses. We offer the cloud service-delivery platform vCloud Director as an example of one of our products. 

vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's a VMware product. The majority of our customers already have this product on-prem; they are happy to use the same solution also in our cloud environment.

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.

It is a very stable solution.

My impressions of the scalability of vCloud Director are all positive.

Up until today, everything has been running smoothly. We haven't needed to contact the technical support team.

The initial setup was completed four years ago; the deployment was not straightforward or easy from what I can recall. We've installed the environment this year and it was quite straightforward. Much easier than five years ago.

I can't remember what our setup costs were. I know we paid in VSPP points. Our contract covers other environments so it's not something I monitor.

My only additional commentary has to do with the making improvements to the user interface.

If I was to give vCloud Director a rating from one to ten, 10 being the best, I'd give it an 8 based on the fact that it's stable, our customers seem to like it, and we can manage it quite easily.

Our primary use case is for our clients to manage their infrastructure.

This solution has helped us make money and provision our clients faster. 

We have found the multi-tenants to be a valuable feature. 

I think that the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features are the future. We work with the cloud Availability product. We want our clients to use it but we have had a lot of problems with it so we'll wait for the next version. 

It's very stable.

Scalability is stable. I have the ability to scale horizontally. 

The GSS engineers are good. 

We analyzed the markets and our clients. We gathered some feedback from our clients and after that, we decided on this solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We integrated in-house. 

vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool. 

We looked at VMware and Open Source.

I would rate this solution an eight. It has a lot of features in the roadmap, maybe in a few years, I can give it a ten. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to test your environment and to determine whether or not this solution is suitable for you. This solution was a good decision for our clients and we get good feedback from them. 

Our primary use case is for the cloud project and we have utilized it very well so far. 

Working with a single vendor, especially with optimization, has improved our organization. Working with VMware has supported us especially in terms of building a very powerful cloud for our customers.

It has helped us provision new clients faster because it's built on an automated system. It has helped speed up provisioning around 75%.

We have found the whole suite of cloud applications to be the most valuable features. If you start a cloud, either private or hybrid, it will support you and you will get more features. It covers support in terms of computing, networking, and everything.

The self-service feature has helped migrate a new customer from on-premise infrastructure to on-cloud.

It's stable enough to run a business on it. 

Scalability is very good. You can scale up and out. 

Their technical support is very solid, we have a good relationship with them. So far, we haven't had any issues with them.

It can be easy to deploy but there is some complexity in terms of the configuration.

We used a consultant to integrate. 

Working with VMware is different than working with Microsoft SPLA. SPLA is only for service provider level agreement. However, for VMware, you can work in different aspects. With VMware you can build an infrastructure whereas SPLA you can sign and have your licenses for building your infrastructure later on. You can't have the best of both worlds. VMware is better in terms of cost than Microsoft.

I would rate this solution an eight. So far we are satisfied with it, but there are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support. So far they have helped us very well.

I would tell someone looking into this or a similar solution that before deploying any cloud, you need to have a good consultant that can help you to build the cloud well, especially from the start and especially with the infrastructure. There are a lot of components that need to be taken into consideration before doing this.

Our primary use case is for the public cloud. We offer public cloud to various customers. The idea is to offer a cheap public cloud service. 

vCloud has improved our organization because it acts as a DR between the customer's premise to the public cloud. If a customer is looking for disaster recovery at a cheaper price, this is the best solution. 

The self-service capability has been beneficial for my organization. Although we have a problem because it cannot support automation from A to Z. There is a lot of missing. 

This solution has enabled us to provision our clients faster by around 60%.

ESG is one of the most valuable features. It deals with networking, traffic, and the security of some features like load balancer.

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

It's generally stable. 

It's very scalable. 

The problem with vCloud Director is that there are not enough GSS engineers who can support us. Every time that I try to open a ticket with GSS support, they ask me to wait until the next day. If I try to open a ticket with another product like vSphere or vSAN I will get a quick answer.

vCloud Availability is hard to install but vCloud Director is easy to install.

We used an integrator who was great. 

vCloud Director isn't cheap.

I would rate this solution a six because, from the end-user experience, it's hard to deal with the portal compared to other solutions like OpenStack.

I do a lot of monitoring around this solution. Our hosted platform guys use it more than I do. Everything I use it for works well.

My impression of the data protection, data recovery, and container features is that they're all very good, I like them. Although I don't particularly have a use case for them within our company. It's very expensive but it's something we've looked into.

I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off.

I haven't had problems with stability. It's pretty stable.

There are a lot of scalability options. 

Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all of the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair, a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite a niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on.

We picked up this solution because we needed to provide new services.

We went with VMware because we have a lot of VMware experts in our business, it's something that we're quite skilled at. We are partners as well. VMware is generally the first protocol for these sort of things.

We integrated in-house.

Compared to alternatives like Microsoft SPLA, this solution is on the expensive side. It's an expensive solution but it comes with its benefits for being pricey. 

I would rate this solution an eight. I haven't had too many problems with it but I don't think it's perfect. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to manage VMs on their own.

It has improved our organization by speeding up some basic scenarios. They can manage a simple operation on their own. 

We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots.

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.

Generally, it's quite stable. We don't have issues where the Director doesn't work. However, sometimes the vCloud Director cannot finish some operations for some reason. We'll need to try the operation twice or three times, redeploy, and do other steps. It could use some improvement. It would be better if it was a click and go.

Scalability is fine. If we need it, it works nice, but it's not our main focus.

Their technical support is good. Their guys are well trained and answer quickly. 

Most of our clients are using classic solutions from the vSphere, 6, 5.5, or even older. We give them vCloud Director as an option for their business. 

This solution is cheaper than other alternatives. 

We looked into other cloud solutions like Microsoft Cloud and ABS. Our clients chose NSX because they have us as a middleman for support. 

I rated this solution a seven because the search button really bothers me. Also, because it isn't always able to finish an operation. 

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. 

We are a service provider and our primary use case for vCloud Director is to build our own product.

It has helped us develop a better way of selling services to customers, evolve from the typical housing, and make revenues for the Telefonica company.

We like that it's multi-tenant, is supported, that it evolves with time and allows us to offer services to our enterprise customers in the B2B segment

The self-service features have been very valuable to our organization. We are a service provider so we push access to our customers so that they can self-serve. With every version, it evolves more. It gets better with time.

It allows us to provision new clients faster because we also automate with CLI which is a valuable feature for us.

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

Stability is very good, rock solid. 

We have some limitations with scalability because we are service providers. In the past with things like the number of VLANs, external networks, and the number of volumes per customer, we had to be very, very careful to be able to scale properly and with business sense.

Their technical support is very good. 

We've been in the hosting business for fifteen years, so it was a natural evolution for us when it came time to switch. In a way, we are growing together with VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward the first time. It was complex the second time. It became a brownfield because we had several products integrated and we had to connect them every time. The roadmap wasn't easy, but we did it. 

We went directly with VMware Professional Services for the integration. We wanted a guaranteed seal and quality from the vendor.

In terms of costs, I would say there is no comparison between this solution and alternatives. If you are in the market for VMware services, that's just what it is. You don't have any other product like this on the market.

We didn't look at other alternatives because we know that no other vendors have what VMware has. 

If you're looking into this or a similar solution I would tell you to start fresh and start with VMware Professional Services and their architects from the beginning. 

I would definitely rate this solution a ten. It has been working flawlessly for the last ten years and we have been very happy with it.

We use vCloud Director for our customers. They use it to deploy work machine networking and to manage their own applications and backup solutions.

It enables us to provision our clients faster but the process is different. It is faster and the customer can auto-deploy via a template. It can take three to five minutes depending on the type of operating system.

The most valuable features for us are that our customers can create their own data center.  At the moment we don't use vCloud Director for data protection or disaster recovery. We are thinking about seeing the demo for vCloud Director and to implement the data next year. 

The self-service capabilities have allowed our customers to have their own templates and to deploy from those templates. 

We would like to see them up the storage. 

We've been using this solution for more than four years and we have found it to be stable.  

We have found it to be scalable. Each year we know they will implement more and more features. 

Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner. Overall, we are satisfied. 

Initially, the setup was complex but VMware is working to simplify the integration. 

We implemented it ourselves. 

Our customers see reduced costs because they use our solution. I see that the company is growing and is a positive part of the solution.

Our customers use different products like Azure, Amazon, and VMware. They use our infrastructure for disaster recovery. The objective is to recover. 

We chose to switch to VMware because our customers don't want to spend a lot to change make a transition.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to use vCloud Director if a customer wants to remove their old hardware.

I rated this solution an eight because it's a good product.

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.

We use the vCloud Director as a multi-tenanted cloud provider, and it's amazing. It makes provisioning new customers so much easier, and our customers are given power over their platform. It gives them the idea that they have a virtual private cloud. It is the main product that we sell in our business.

vCloud Director requires less knowledge to get into in the first place. Therefore, when we bring in new members of staff, we can always give them the customer experience straightaway, and they can pick it up quite easily. This means the training is easy to start with, then we can introduce them to the more advanced features behind the scenes later on.

In terms of disaster recovery (DR), we sell it as a service to our clients. We have our vCloud Directors spanning across two different data centers. We've had some of them that had problems go wrong in one data center with their software. Then, we are able to just move them across with no problems, except for minor downtime. Everything works together, which has been great.

The scalability is amazing. It gives our customers the options that they need. If they suddenly need to add more resources, they don't need to plan for it. They just need to pay us for it, and we can extend it for them.

It's good giving the customers power. Thus, if a customer wants to reboot their server or if their server is hung, they don't need to give us a call. They simply need to log into their portal and reboot it. 

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.

Stability has been great. We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading, but VMware has always stepped in. They have been able to fix everything for us. It's a fantastic product.

The scalability has been very good. We can add more hosts in. We have not had any problems with it so far. 

The technical support is great. We've used VMware support primarily with our upgrades, and they have been great every time. We've had some issues, and they've always been able to fix them in a good time frame.

The initial setup was complex at first, because none of us had dealt with the technology before. However, as we followed documentation and had help from VMware to get us off the ground, it became easier as time went on and we became more familiar with the product.

We deployed it in-house.

Provisioning new clients is normally very quick. It's quite easy just to roll out a new client. The only complicated bit is deploying the service for them afterwards.

VMware was always the way to go because other platforms, like Hyper-V, were already out there, but the products weren't as mature. They didn't have as many features. VMware is very good for HA and disaster recovery. We needed the scalability, because we started as a very small business and VMware allowed us to expand without too much hassle.

It is a great product. It is like magic. It allows you to do so much.

Put it in a lab, and you'll instantly fall in love with it. That's all you need to know. Just give it a go. If you're looking for something that allows your customers to get access to their VMs and stop bothering you, then get in there and try this solution out.

vRealize Orchestrator is a powerful tool. A common query that we get from our customers is they might have issues where their servers are slowing down, but they have no idea why. So, we can pull up all of the graphs and say, “Very clearly your storage is too busy. It has too many IOPS or your CPU is maxing out.” This gives us a sales opportunity, because we can sell them a resource, and hopefully fix their problem.

We don't use the container features.

We use it for hosting our customers: a single environment with a single GUI. Our customers are known to have compute and Eos infrastructure cells. 

We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center.

With vCloud Director, our customers can use the VMs:

• They can destroy them.
• They can create new ones.
• They can change them.

They can do this in simplest and quickest way possible.

• Its simplicity
• It is powerful.

You can use it for a few customers. However, if you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution.

Concurrent users use tends to go slowly.

The technical support is super.

We decided to automate our actions.

The initial setup was complex because we had more than one solution to implement.

For VMware, we hired an engineer for a couple of days.

We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers.

HPE and VMware were on our shortlist.

We have also used Microsoft SPLA.

We use vRealize Orchestrator with vCloud Director for creating work flows. You can automate your work.

Using the self-service capabilities, our customers can quickly use the product with instructions and learn it within an hour.

We are using it as our QA environment.

It has helped us with user segmentation and QA.

It is fast at deploying environments and good for segmenting users.

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.

Stability is okay.

Scalability is great.

I haven't used technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It enables us to provision new clients more quickly.

I haven't used any alternative solutions.

Go for this solution, but you will need quite a big environment to utilize vCloud Director.

We use it and have several customers who use it. 

It has performed well. We don't have any real problems with it.

The product helped us get more customers, so that worked out quite well. It saves us a lot of time provisioning new clients.

vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works. We don't have to worry about it. We maintain the platform, and our customers take care of the rest.

I am happy with the data protection.

So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well.

I always worry about disaster recovery. I can't afford for it to break.

It is very scalable, which is one of the reasons that we use it. We have not had to increase the resources that we have thrown at it yet. However, when we do, the process should be straightforward.

We have never really needed any technical support. 

When we were first creating the cloud, we asked for some input from some VMware specialists. Since then, we haven't had any issues.

We were using VMware already, then some of our customers asked if we could give them a cloud solution

In the end, the initial setup was straightforward, but we had to try to do it a few times.

There seemed to be different bits of paperwork or instructions available from various places. We always had to go looking for what to do next. There didn't seem to be any type of integrated path on how to do the initial setup.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

We had experience with VMware, so we stuck with VMware.

I would recommend VMware and vCloud Director, if they want to go cloud.

It's a virtual data center for customers, and it's performing well.

Organizations can use this product for disaster recovery or for migration to our cloud.

This solution enables us to provision new clients more quickly.

We are using it like a virtual data center for customers with all the benefits.

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.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good. We are working now to increase the size of our environment.

Technical support is great. They help us 24/7.

I recommend this solution. It is a very good product.

We would like to start using the container feature and PKS. We are mostly using the vCloud Director, vSAN, and vCloud Availability.

Right now, we are not using their self-service. We implemented our self-services. Developers in our company make a self-service portal. However, we are also looking at the self-service of VMware products.

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.

The most valuable features are:

• Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process).
• Support for Windows desktop OS's (mostly used as test machines for software development companies).
• Resource pool payment model (pay for resources instead of paying for hourly use).

We were able to test Windows desktop OS's (XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10).

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.

I have used VCloud Director for over five years.

No stability issues.

The resource pool payment model is very limited when it comes to scalability.

I rate technical support 6/10.

We used rented servers running VMware ESX/vSphere on SoftLayer and decided to switch to VCloud Director because we got tired of the hardware issues we had with those servers (RAID controller failures, HDD failures).

Initial setup was straightforward.

We tried Terremark, which was also based on VMware (don't know if they used VCloud Director).

vCloud Director: To name a few, ease of use, robust security and easy extensibility to VMware's Hybrid cloud platform; VMware vCloud Air and public cloud space.

vCAC (vCloud Automation Center): Now known as 'vRealize Automation' is the best in class, high profile automation for your cloud workflows. Vendor neutral; Apart from VMware Cloud suits, it can be used with other vendor cloud platforms like Amazon, OpenStack, Azure etc.

vROps (vCenter Operations Manager): Now known as 'vRealize Operations'; vROps is the best in class most granular, high penetration monitoring, investigative and troubleshooting tool for your Cloud, datacenter, VDI environments Used for Capacity planning, Performance monitoring and troubleshooting etc.

vSphere: vSphere being the foundation for vCloud, there are many takeaways; Long distance vMotion, HA, FT, DRS, Storage DRS, Storage profiles, dual heartbeat in cluster environments. 4X capacity increase in 6.0 compared to version 5. vCenter Server Appliance now has the same scalability numbers as the Windows installable vCenter Server: 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. FT now supports 4 vCPUs VMs and 64GB memory with Storage redundancy.

vSphere: vMotion (ease of migrating VMs from one host to another), DRS (ease of migrating VMs from one host to another automatically to balance out workloads in cluster environments), Storage DRS (ease of migrating VMs from one Datastore to another automatically to balance out workloads in storage cluster environments, HA (High availability is ensured by the newly developed FDM construct. FT (Ensuring 100% up-times reliably), Storage profiles (to bifurcate storage tiers accoring to the SLAs etc., dual heartbeat in cluster environments for confirmed Host isolation avoiding false alarms/isolation responses; key to maintain SLAs.

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

I've been using vSphere, vCloud Director, vCOPs suits and vCAC for almost 4 years.

None.

None.

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

Excellent.

Excellent.

Yes; Microsoft's Azure for cloud and Hyper-V for virtualization. The reason for switching was indeed the efficiency crisis with Hyper-V resulting in subsequent service issues ->service tickets-> increased number of troubleshooting tasks -> increased number of breaches in the SLAs

Straightforward, as it's designed at a more abstract level.

Vendor as-well-as in-house. I give them a 5-star rating.

Depends on the licences purchased per ESXi, vCenter for vSphere and licences purchased for vCloud Director, vCOPs suites.

Yes; Microsoft's Azure for cloud and Hyper-V for virtualization.

Go for it. Follow the bottom-up approach; VMware's Implementation Guide for each product and you will sail through.

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.

Ability to give our developers a self-service environment, where they can go on particular portal and deploy their own systems.

Automation piece. If we can continue to develop automation for developers, that should seamlessly carry over into product environment as well without admin heavy lifting. In automation, there's still a lot of manual processes, but with vCloud, less so.

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.

We’ve already deployed three-tiered applications with just a push of a button to deploy from dev to staging to production.

In regards to stability, this gives you more control yet takes out the human element. There’s consistency that’s set in the script and then we can make small changes as we grow.

They’re now moving more into vRealize and more integrated systems. It used to need more scripting, but VMware are now working more hand in hand with other solutions.

Great tech support. I love those guys. Every time I had a ticket, I could escalate, and they’d work in tandem with other vendors (i.e. NetApp) to find solution.

I wasn't part of initial set-up, but I believe it’s complex based on the senior engineer’s experience.

For example, right now the metrics to upgrade is complex, requiring certain elements. It’s very simple to use and train end-users. In our shop, we try to make them more self-sufficient, so a lot of knowledge transfer.

Access the enormous amount of virtual apps they have to get practical performance instead of just the KB to deploy. They also need to get an understanding of audience as well. Understand pain points to understand how to approach solution.

It loses points because things are moving so quickly that it has yet to catch up.

Flexibility – it allows me to adapt the product to all student needs.

Students using the environment vs. not using the environment. Students can find products that they want to use and if they’re using it, they’re happy with it.

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.

It’s fairly stable, no bugs no crashes.

It scales fine, it went from 1,000 to 2,000 machines without any issues at all.

Technical support’s wonderful. Whenever we find an issue, we submit a ticket and they resolve it within an hour usually. Sometimes the complexity of the environment is high, and that’s fine, but usually it’s very quick.

We were using Lab Manager, and when VMware discontinued it, we needed to switch.

Complicated – there was no upgrade path from Lab Manager to vCloud Director, so we basically had to design a new solution.

No, because of the time VMware has been in the market. I don’t like using people that are new, and VMware has been around for a long time. Also, we just thought it would be simpler to stay with the same vendor.

I really don’t know of any products right now other than this. They’re pretty high – if someone has a peer review that’s low, I won’t consider the product.

The physical segmentation of networking and security.

Lately we have been using it to import acquisition products into our environment without reconfiguring them at all, due to how the segmentation works.

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.

It's stable, usually admin error if something goes wrong.

It's infinitely scalable.

It's good overall. We have had times when it has been slower than we would have liked, but I would say that about every vendor we use.

Setup is easy.

It's all about the product, what limitations the product doesn’t have. We speak to vendors all the time, but once you see a product and how it will fit in then that’s the real test.

You can't go wrong with VMware. The stability and the flexibility it allows, they do it best compared to competitors. Peer reviews are fairly important but I try to form my opinion from a POC over anything else.

The orchestrator is the most valuable feature.

It helps us provide private cloud solutions to our clients.

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.

I've used it for two years.

It's very good.

It was complex as it does not include a good, extensive feasibility and compatibility guide.

We used a vendor team who were very good.

It is quite good on ROI and year on year it is about 50%.

vCloud Director is a good solution, but it is costly when compared to other solutions like Nutanix.

We didn't evaluate other solutions.

Choosing VMware in general, is best in terms of functionality, but it is not necessarily cost effective, as their licensing and setuo cost are too hight. Maybe we will see more products for cloud and automation.

It has easy to deploy machines.

A department can deploy a machine easily without using the IT department.

I only used it for four months.

None in this version.

No issues encountered.

Yes, a lot including, for example, with Chargeback Manager integration.

8/10.

5/10 as the VMware support seem very ignorant.

No, but in the future, we are planning to install Open Stack as it's simpler.

It has an easy setup by following the documentation.

We used a vendor team who I would rate as 7/10.

We couldn't calculate it.

Yes, with other colleagues. No implementations being done by us at the moment.

I think VMware has abandoned the product a with vSphere 5.5, vCloud Director is an obsolete solution. As VMware no longer offers the product, it is now difficult to implement.

The real multi tenancy and distributed administration for vDCs is the goal of this product, which combines consuming resources as a service with a great governance model for different customers.

Suppose you need to build one or more virtual datacenter, and meet the demands of customers, supplier and departments. In a traditional architecture (vCenter and esxi hosts) you need hard integration work to answer this problem.

vCloud director solves this problem weaving computational resources, storage and networking with consumption requests from companies, departments and individual operators in a dynamic and safe way.

We combine this architecture with existing vDCs with limited business impact (because vMotion could aid to limit or eliminate downtime). Now selling VM, request demo or trying an environment is very simple: just a few clicks to go!

Improvement in IT departments regarding the delivery of virtual datacenters for Business, Government and Captive area (holding headquarters and associated companies). Hospitals and Governments could use this because data is under their control, with very low risks for stability and security: governance still remains with the cloud consumer.

In my scenario I'm using 2 vDCs (marked as gold and platinum) in 2 different places and allow an organization (our customer) to use parts of these vDCs to stretch VM distribution across a datacenter, make DR on-demand (and without up-front costs) and respond quickly to business demands.

I've been using this solution for 3 years.

Deployment is very simple, but I suggest a little design and hardening phase to meet security and licensing compliance.

Product is mature enough to support huge loads: the underlining technology is the best in class to meet many customer needs. The product is very stable.

Product is born to be scalable, because it should be used in different modes (cloud provider and private cloud environment).

People say that VMware customer service is very helpful and quick to solve issues. In my life I've use this service only for administrative issues (contracts, portals, licensing); this is because documentation, their knowledge base and community always are enough for problem solving.

Official documentation is very good, and could give you skill to deploy, run and improve your vCD system (VMware always work hard for this phase).

Setup was quite straightforward, because VMware always provides great documentation for deployment, configuration and troubleshooting.

I deployed and set up this system in-house (my team staff: virtualization area), because this is a company core-business, and it is the minimum to do to learn and solve problems quickly.

Our ROI was reached considering 2 factors:

- A service provider model built on VMWare contracts and many resource delivery models, cost are as-a-service and bound to the VM vRAM: licensing cost is 1:1 to the assigned resource. Considering 50% of infrastructure cost per VM in 3 years, 10% of VMware cost and 10% of infrastructure cost, break even could be in 1.5 years.

- In both private and public scenarios many administrative tasks are solved by on-demand models that could be elastic and efficient. Considered a manpower reduction of about 40% and a potential reduction of 99% for provisioning tasks. IT Virtual administrator staff finally do the real job: troubleshoot, provision and do only heavy activities with less effort.

One more important thing: vCloud works with his chargeback product to show and take many costs under control.

As mentioned above, the service provider model costs are calculated considering:

- physical environment cost (up front cost or by loan)

- licensing cost 1:1 to vRAM

- setup requires no more than 1 week.

Before installing vCloud director, I suggest:

1. Check HCL and compatibility matrix between vCloud director, vSphere and vCloud network and security (ex: vShield manager)

2. Use vDC resources only for vCloud director purpose, don't mix traditional vSphere and vCloud director usage.