VMware Cloud 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.