VMware Cloud Director Reviews

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.