VMware Cloud Director Reviews

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.

It's a virtual data center for customers, and it's performing well.

Organizations can use this product for disaster recovery or for migration to our cloud.

This solution enables us to provision new clients more quickly.

We are using it like a virtual data center for customers with all the benefits.

We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product.

We are also looking for upgraded VMware environments to the latest versions.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good. We are working now to increase the size of our environment.

Technical support is great. They help us 24/7.

I recommend this solution. It is a very good product.

We would like to start using the container feature and PKS. We are mostly using the vCloud Director, vSAN, and vCloud Availability.

Right now, we are not using their self-service. We implemented our self-services. Developers in our company make a self-service portal. However, we are also looking at the self-service of VMware products.

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.

The tool needs to add more features to improve the console. 

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

The tool is very stable. 

The product is scalable. 

Customer support is usually good. 

Positive

The tool's setup is straightforward. The product's deployment is fast and gets completed in a week. A full deployment can take around one to two months to complete. Only two to three people are required to handle the deployment. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation.

vCloud Director should improve by having support with other cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google cloud.

I have been using vCloud Director for approximately one year.

vCloud Director has been stable in my usage.

The environment of the vCloud Director is able to be scaled.

Our customer has approximately 40,000 users using this solution.

The initial setup of vCloud Director is simple, it is not complex.

We did the implementation of vCloud Director ourselves. We support the solution 24 hours a day seven days a week and we use two to three people for the deployment. 

vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix.

We compared vCloud Director with Nutanix and we found that vCloud Director had more features at the time. However, they have had some updates and they have similar features now.

I rate vCloud Director an eight out of ten.

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.