VMware Cloud Director Reviews

We use vCloud Director as a multiple cloud management solution.

This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis.

I have been using vCloud Director within 12 months.

The solution is stable but could improve.

I have found the solution scales well.

The support responsiveness has been satisfactory.

The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license.

We are evaluating Dynamics from Cisco to perhaps replace this solution.

We are looking for another solution that meets our needs.

I rate vCloud Director a seven out of ten.

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 are VMware Verified Cloud providers. So we run vCloud Director. We run NSX (Network Security Platform). We run the whole suite of VMware products to host our customers' various applications.  

Our primary use case is to enable our customers to use the vCloud Director platform to drive the portal that they create using compute resources from their side. So, it is used for the automation of resources in the VMware on our VMware platform for customers to create Virtual Datacenters.  

Our customers host their applications with us like they would host it with AWS or Azure. So, in terms of that, the most valuable part of the product for us is the ease of creating resources for them to run their applications and infrastructure for doing business.  

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.  

I have been using vCloud Director for eleven years.  

The stability of the product is very good. It is better than just 'good.'  

We manage our scalability using multiple pods. We have a certain number of servers and available storage, and when a VMware customer gets to a certain size, we just install a whole new pod. We manage our scalability that way rather than scaling sideways which we do not want to do. If we scale sideways and you have an issue on your platform, then all your customers are affected. We manage the risk for our customers and our uptime by scaling out the pods.  

In my position, I do not deal with technical support directly, but I have not heard any bad stories about them. Based on that, I would say the technical support must be pretty good.  

The initial installation and setup are very quick. It takes minutes rather than hours or days.  

I can not tell you exactly how much it costs, but I know our bill is in the millions (rand) every month.  

I think the product has come a long way since its introduction. It is stable now. In the early days, there were some teething problems. At this point, I would definitely recommend it. It has become a mature product now and it works well.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the vCloud product as a good eight or nine-out-of-ten.  

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.