We use it for infrastructure provisioning such as providing machines and monitoring with logging and so forth.
We use the infrastructure as a service cloud, that is, we use the features as infrastructure for this. We are not using any platform services.
The licenses themselves are not costly.
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.
I've been using vCloud Director for two years.
Every quarter or after every quarter, they release new versions and new upgrades. If we don't do the new upgrades, it causes stability issues.
We currently rely on VMware for deployment, and they portray it as a complex process that needs a lot of judges.
It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly.
The public cloud and the hosted cloud solutions are going in parallel, and some countries have the requirement to host the data locally. Most of the organizations who don't have these compliance requirements go for the public cloud, but I would say that hiring and retaining skilled resources matters a lot. Because if you have skilled, experienced resources, then things will be easy for you, but if you can't retain the skilled resources and things are quite complex, then you will need to accept all of the company's conditions.
Overall, we are happy with the product, so I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.