VMware Cloud Director Reviews

Our company uses the solution as a cloud service provider for our virtual data center that serves 100 customers. 

We create demands and assign them to customers who run the workloads, access virtual machines, and perform network operations. 

The solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter. 

Multiple events can be managed in the solution's environment.

It is easy to leverage the capabilities for server and network virtualization. 

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

I have been using the solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is good and I rate them a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Our company previously used OpenStack. 

The setup and deployment are rather complex because all networking and storage components need to be included. 

We partnered with the vendor for initial deployment. Our internal team of four included server, network, and VMware administrators. 

The solution provides us with the capability to offer managed services where we realize ROI. 

I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities from the operational, networking, and log-in sides. A mid-high or high license will allow you to deliver all of the features available.

We evaluated the solution against OpenStack and decided to switch. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We have a partnership with vCloud Director, and we are a customer. We run one of the largest private clouds globally.

The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built.

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.

I have been using vCloud Director for seven years.

Once configured, vCloud Director is stable.

vCloud Director needs to be more scalable for private clouds.

I would rate technical support a seven out of ten. Personally, I have a network at VMware that I can connect with when I have a challenge, I can depend on it more than calling their support desk.

Neutral

The initial setup of this solution is not easy. You need to use professional services to be effective. Unfortunately, the skill set for vCloud Director is not easily available, and it cannot be consumed straight out of the box. 

Once deployed, we only require one person to spend twenty minutes a day on maintaining the product.

vCloud Director is an expensive solution. Our organization selects the top tier of the product options, which ensures that we get every feature we want.

The decision to use this solution depends on the size of the organization. A small organization that has less than one hundred servers deploying vCloud Director will find that the cost of running is much cheaper than the product itself. I would not recommend anything above one hundred. However, if you have to constantly change, and you have a dynamic environment, then it would make sense.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten overall.

What I found most valuable in vCloud Director is the multi-tenancy.

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.

I used version 10.2 of vCloud Director for the past twelve months, and the total number of years I used it was from four to five years.

vCloud Director is quite stable. It has good stability.

vCloud Director, in terms of scalability, can be improved.

The initial setup for vCloud Director was simple when we started, but then it became complex, particularly when we started growing. When we had multiple tenants, and a unique set of tenant organizations within vCloud Director, setting it up started to get complex.

I'm a team leader of a set of consultants in one company in UAE, so I downloaded reports, for example, about vCloud Director for reference. It helped me in designing a solution. I used to work for VMware as a post-sale consultant based in India, but then I quit and joined a different company. I have a personal experience with the vCloud Director.

In terms of maintaining vCloud Director, if you have a good amount of footprint of VMware staff, it would still depend on the number of objects you are controlling through the solution. If you have just one or two organizations created, it's fine, meaning one person can do the maintenance. In my scenario, however, I was supporting a customer who is one of the largest clients in VMware, who is using vCloud Director, so it was almost a team of six to seven people who were involved in maintaining the solution.

My advice to people looking into implementing vCloud Director would depend on their use case. vCloud Director has a very limited use case because most needs can be taken care of by vRealize Automation. If you're not a VCPP (VMware certified partner) and providing the VMware services to the external organization, you don't need the vCloud Director. You can have your private cloud based on open shift, open stack, vRealize, and a bunch of other solutions. vCloud Director is predominantly only for the VCPPs who are authorized to sell the VMware cloud to external customers, which they manage on behalf of VMware.

I'm rating vCloud Director seven out of ten.

Yes, we are using this solution to provide cloud services to our customers. I'm an L2 Cloud Ops Engineer.

The solution has a user friendly interface. It's easy for us to provide services to customers and our customers find the UI easy too. The solution is reliable and performs well. 

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.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The stability could be improved.

We have around 50 users for now and we're able to scale up at any time. The solution is used on a daily basis and we have one person who deals with maintenance. 

The technical support is good. 

The initial setup was pretty easy.

I would advise anyone wanting to use the solution to get training from VMware. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

vCloud Director is used for our customers and my company for the cloud.

I have been using vCloud Director for approximately one year.

vCloud Director is a stable solution.

We have approximately three people using vCloud Director in my company.

The support provided by the vCloud Director is good.

The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier. 

My advice to others is for them to check the requirements before implementation.

I rate vCloud Director a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to manage our virtual machines and basic settings.

We can run it on self-hosted systems, and we are happy with the stability of vCloud Director.

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.

I've been dealing with this solution for two to three years.

I'm pretty happy with the stability of this solution.

The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company.

I would rate vCloud Director at nine on a scale from one to ten.

The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation.

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

I have been using vCloud Director for approximately one year.

vCloud Director has been stable in my usage.

The environment of the vCloud Director is able to be scaled.

Our customer has approximately 40,000 users using this solution.

The initial setup of vCloud Director is simple, it is not complex.

We did the implementation of vCloud Director ourselves. We support the solution 24 hours a day seven days a week and we use two to three people for the deployment. 

vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix.

We compared vCloud Director with Nutanix and we found that vCloud Director had more features at the time. However, they have had some updates and they have similar features now.

I rate vCloud Director an eight out of ten.

This solution is used for hosting customers and providing multi-tenancy so that we can have shared infrastructures used by multiple customers.

We have our own organization. We have a private cloud that we host, and we onboard customers on that private cloud.

It's a cloud-based solution.

There are currently more than 40 customers that are hosted on the private cloud across the US, UK, and Canada.

The most valuable features are the multi-tenancy and multi-site configuration. It's very efficient. The virtual machine deployment and segregation of customers due to multi-tenancy is also very simplified. That is the reason we chose this product for hosting the private cloud.

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.

I have been using this solution for almost 12 years.

The stability is good but not excellent because of the interoperability between different components of VMware products, which form a private cloud. The interoperability needs to be improved between the different components of the private cloud.

Scalability-wise, it's a pretty good product. We can scale to multiple regions, and we can also increase the number of sales as required. If the customers in a specific region are too many and there is a lot of access, we just need to add more vCloud Director sales for customers.

Technical support needs to improve because the private cloud is comprised of multiple solutions. A customer has to log to identify which product is having problems, and then log a call with a vendor. The support from the vendor is not very good. For some of the cases, we have to chase them for almost a month to get a resolution.

We previously used VLS Automation earlier and multi-tenancy was also quite simple over there, but the only thing was the SSO integration with the multi-tenancy was not consistent. That's the reason we switched from VLS Automation to the private cloud, vCloud Director.

Initial setup was pretty simple. For deployment, we used three or four people across six regions.

We use around 25 people to maintain the solution across six regions.

We pay monthly for all of the licenses.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.