Currently, there is some uncertainty about the future of the product line with regards to Dell's takeover of EMC. Because VBlock is so closely wrapped around the Cisco Blade converged infrastructure environment, I am concerned that Dell may end the relationship and kill the VBlock line, pushing their other VCE products that can run on Dell servers. Initial indications from VCE were that this was not going to happen, but I am concerned that Dell may not really know what they have taken on when they took over the EMC / VCE / VMware companies.

It's difficult to think of anything that needs to be improved because it's a good stable system, but paid support is expensive so the cost of operation could be lowered.

In the next release, I would like to see a smaller footprint in the data center and have improvements to disk performance.

The user control could be more advanced. They should work to improve this in future releases.

I'd like a hypervisor to be added to the solution.

Upgrading should be easier. It should just be a click of a button to upload, enter calls or enter systems.

The integration with other vendors' products needs to be looked at. It's not as flexible as we would like it to be.

There is a different platform and there are different interfaces for different parts of the product. Although there are some centralized components, you still manage each component using its own set of tools. There is definitely room for improvement in this regard.

I would like to have a catalogue like menu where you simply define your end computing needs and the rest would be taken care of internally.

The initial setup could be unified to make it simpler.

1. The infrastructure is converged, but the teams, not so much. It is so complex that the converged infrastructure needs converged management.
2. While most public clouds are deployed on Linux, there is current no certified Vblock working on KVM hypervisors.
   

Improvement comes from customers who have sent many remarks for evolutions or needs to VCE. Most of them have been taken into account, and VCE introduced a lot of new features last year in their roadmap like vxBlock (with Vmware NSX), vxRack, EVO-Rail and so on.

I think there needs to be more tools to monitor and manage the Vblock™ as a whole, instead of pieces.

Due to the complexity of the complete solution, there are many groups involved in delivering the complete solution. Tighter alignment could simplify and speed up the configuration and delivery process.

• The patching process
• Timeliness of updates/releases
• Compatibility with current ESX versions

Use host profile as this feature is available on the product acquired, including on the ESXi install on the blades, instead of create all server manually.

• User interface
• More customer/client involvement in back-end management.

The VCE Vision product definitely needs some improvement as it is not as easy to use as other commercial off the shelf software. There is a lot of configuration that needs to be done from the Linux command line. Hopefully in the future all configuration can be done from an HTML5 webpage. Also, each Vblock needs its own Vision appliance which gets cumbersome when you own many Vblocks. The ability to use a pair of HA vision servers to manage multiple Vblocks would be helpful

The implementation and support could be better.

The only thing I would like to see is that although they strongly advocate that you cannot change any of its parts, and that would undermine its performance, but a little allowance should be allowed for disassembly within certain areas, which would be nice.

There are little things, for example, we ran into bugs when upgrading a blade, but that was an EMC issue, not hardware.

As the technology changes and comes down in price as well, we're looking at VDI, having a virtual desktop infrastructure, so instead of using client, using a virtual environment, a thin client.

Also, I would like to see them improve their switching infrastructure and rely on Cisco configurations. They are a bit more complex and technical, but result in a slightly reduced cost in terms of switching on the network side of it. It's a very complicated process, our configuration, from the network side.

VCE tools, like Vision or AMP were not stand alone, and depended too much on other management consoles. RCM upgrades were not scripted, and you needed to roll on your own. We were led to believe this would be otherwise.

OEM services requires too much planning and low availability of certified engineers.