VMware Cloud Director Reviews

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).

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.

We are a service partner that offers cloud services based on Cloud Director.

One valuable feature is the true multitenancy capabilities for the core infrastructure service that Cloud Director provides.

Cloud Director has room for improvement in many areas. One critical thing that comes to mind is the hyperscalers. They could be more seamlessly integrated into the hybrid cloud. Cloud Director should be capable of hooking up with those. For example, they recently started allowing customers to perform S3 integrations with Cloud Director. So a customer can integrate his S3 buckets from AWS with the Cloud Director. Okay, fine. But what about Azure? There should be more integration capabilities. 

Secondly, VMware has made some progress in terms of balancers, but I think it needs a little more refinement and flexibility. This is not limited to just the VMware marketplace. More flexibility will make it easier for any service provider to leverage and monetize them.

Last but not least, from a networking and monitoring perspective, there should be a little more native monitoring capabilities, especially metering capability. Metering is one of the areas where I find Cloud Director leaves much to be desired. VMware can do more to make it a much more metered product.

Cloud Director's out-of-the-box capabilities should be good enough that you don't have to look for a third-party product to give you those capabilities. Networking-wise, I think it's good. Still, I think the networking capabilities are not fully realized on Cloud Director.  VMware should do a little more work to reveal all of the capabilities through Cloud Director rather than just at the back of Cloud Director. You've got to have those features exposed to customers as a self-service rather than managed service.

I've been using Cloud Director since 2012.

Scalability is a word you have to look at from different perspectives. I think some of the capabilities they have introduced in terms of load balancing deliver out-of-the-box scalability for tenants. But as a product itself, Cloud Director needs more multi-site capabilities. I have seen some work being done but that's just a start, I would say.

My experience with VMware support has been mixed. Sometimes you get fantastic support. The techs are really knowledgeable and know what they're talking about. But then there are certain times where I have seen some things that affect the client as well. So I think VMware support has some room for improvement. They can do much better. VMware as a brand definitely can do better in terms of response times and capabilities. 

The Cloud Director setup has improved tremendously compared to where it started. I have seen how complex it used to be. Now, it has become easy and robust. The setup is more straightforward and seamless than before. 

In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly.

I rate Cloud Director eight out of 10. As a service provider, we have to look at a couple of available and other things, so I would rate it around eight. I have to deduct two points because some small things make a huge difference to a service provider, but they might not matter too much from a customer-experience perspective. 

This is the go-to tool for anyone looking for standard out-of-the-box capabilities in a fully multitenant public cloud software that they can leverage to offer services to their customers. It's also good for enterprises that want to keep a more segregated approach to their different departments and things. You definitely have much better control and a more streamlined way to offer services to your internal teams or your customers out-of-the-box in a multitenant way. And you don't need to worry too much about how you're going to network these things together or how you're going to control the assets of the computers and resources. 

In my experience, it is a very robust product. I have used this product since the initial version and watched it evolve into a highly mature product. It's a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.