What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
FT capacity issues are resolved now in vSphere 6.0. Cheers!!
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using vSphere, vCloud Director, vCOPs suits and vCAC for almost 4 years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
FT capacity issues are resolved now in vSphere 6.0. Cheers!
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Excellent.
Technical Support:
Excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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
How was the initial setup?
Straightforward, as it's designed at a more abstract level.
What about the implementation team?
Vendor as-well-as in-house. I give them a 5-star rating.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Depends on the licences purchased per ESXi, vCenter for vSphere and licences purchased for vCloud Director, vCOPs suites.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes; Microsoft's Azure for cloud and Hyper-V for virtualization.
What other advice do I have?
Go for it. Follow the bottom-up approach; VMware's Implementation Guide for each product and you will sail through.
Which version of this solution are you currently using?
6.0
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