vCloud Director Reviews

The real multi tenancy and distributed administration for vDCs is the goal of this product, which combines consuming resources as a service with a great governance model for different customers.

Suppose you need to build one or more virtual datacenter, and meet the demands of customers, supplier and departments. In a traditional architecture (vCenter and esxi hosts) you need hard integration work to answer this problem.

vCloud director solves this problem weaving computational resources, storage and networking with consumption requests from companies, departments and individual operators in a dynamic and safe way.

We combine this architecture with existing vDCs with limited business impact (because vMotion could aid to limit or eliminate downtime). Now selling VM, request demo or trying an environment is very simple: just a few clicks to go!

Improvement in IT departments regarding the delivery of virtual datacenters for Business, Government and Captive area (holding headquarters and associated companies). Hospitals and Governments could use this because data is under their control, with very low risks for stability and security: governance still remains with the cloud consumer.

In my scenario I'm using 2 vDCs (marked as gold and platinum) in 2 different places and allow an organization (our customer) to use parts of these vDCs to stretch VM distribution across a datacenter, make DR on-demand (and without up-front costs) and respond quickly to business demands.

I've been using this solution for 3 years.

Deployment is very simple, but I suggest a little design and hardening phase to meet security and licensing compliance.

Product is mature enough to support huge loads: the underlining technology is the best in class to meet many customer needs. The product is very stable.

Product is born to be scalable, because it should be used in different modes (cloud provider and private cloud environment).

People say that VMware customer service is very helpful and quick to solve issues. In my life I've use this service only for administrative issues (contracts, portals, licensing); this is because documentation, their knowledge base and community always are enough for problem solving.

Official documentation is very good, and could give you skill to deploy, run and improve your vCD system (VMware always work hard for this phase).

Setup was quite straightforward, because VMware always provides great documentation for deployment, configuration and troubleshooting.

I deployed and set up this system in-house (my team staff: virtualization area), because this is a company core-business, and it is the minimum to do to learn and solve problems quickly.

Our ROI was reached considering 2 factors:

- A service provider model built on VMWare contracts and many resource delivery models, cost are as-a-service and bound to the VM vRAM: licensing cost is 1:1 to the assigned resource. Considering 50% of infrastructure cost per VM in 3 years, 10% of VMware cost and 10% of infrastructure cost, break even could be in 1.5 years.

- In both private and public scenarios many administrative tasks are solved by on-demand models that could be elastic and efficient. Considered a manpower reduction of about 40% and a potential reduction of 99% for provisioning tasks. IT Virtual administrator staff finally do the real job: troubleshoot, provision and do only heavy activities with less effort.

One more important thing: vCloud works with his chargeback product to show and take many costs under control.

As mentioned above, the service provider model costs are calculated considering:

- physical environment cost (up front cost or by loan)

- licensing cost 1:1 to vRAM

- setup requires no more than 1 week.

Before installing vCloud director, I suggest:

1. Check HCL and compatibility matrix between vCloud director, vSphere and vCloud network and security (ex: vShield manager)

2. Use vDC resources only for vCloud director purpose, don't mix traditional vSphere and vCloud director usage.

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.

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. 

We use it for hybrid cloud management and orchestration.

I've been using it for three years.

vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks.

The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license.

I would not highly recommend vCloud Director and rate it at seven out of ten.

The most valuable features are the UI, the interface, and accessibility.

It's easy to manage, it's stable, there are fewer bugs, and the version is upgradable.

We are using 8.0 which is going out of support and will need to upgrade to 10, which would not take much time to upgrade.

There is no support for versions below 10.x. Support for previous versions would be nice, but it's the end of support which is the company policy. We cannot debate it and they provide us with extended support as well, for a year.

This is is more than enough time for an organization to upgrade to the latest version to be secure and protected.

There is always room for improvement.

In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It's a stable solution.

vCloud Director is scalable.

We have over 1000 people in our organization who are using this solution.

Technical support is good for version 10.x. There is support through the vendor but not for the previous versions. 

For versions 9.0 and above, there is support available.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the number of cells. For example, if you have two cells it will take 40 to 45 minutes. Not more than that.

This is an expensive solution.

We will upgrade and continue our usage of this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution. It's a very good product.

I would rate vCloud Director a nine out of ten.

We use vCloud Director for our customers. They use it to deploy work machine networking and to manage their own applications and backup solutions.

It enables us to provision our clients faster but the process is different. It is faster and the customer can auto-deploy via a template. It can take three to five minutes depending on the type of operating system.

The most valuable features for us are that our customers can create their own data center.  At the moment we don't use vCloud Director for data protection or disaster recovery. We are thinking about seeing the demo for vCloud Director and to implement the data next year. 

The self-service capabilities have allowed our customers to have their own templates and to deploy from those templates. 

We would like to see them up the storage. 

We've been using this solution for more than four years and we have found it to be stable.  

We have found it to be scalable. Each year we know they will implement more and more features. 

Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner. Overall, we are satisfied. 

Initially, the setup was complex but VMware is working to simplify the integration. 

We implemented it ourselves. 

Our customers see reduced costs because they use our solution. I see that the company is growing and is a positive part of the solution.

Our customers use different products like Azure, Amazon, and VMware. They use our infrastructure for disaster recovery. The objective is to recover. 

We chose to switch to VMware because our customers don't want to spend a lot to change make a transition.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to use vCloud Director if a customer wants to remove their old hardware.

I rated this solution an eight because it's a good product.

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).