Our primary use case of this solution is to manage VMs on their own.
Engineer at T-Systems
VMs can be managed on their own but searching in the cloud is problematic
Pros and Cons
- "We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
It has improved our organization by speeding up some basic scenarios. They can manage a simple operation on their own.
What is most valuable?
We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots.
What needs improvement?
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.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is fine. If we need it, it works nice, but it's not our main focus.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support is good. Their guys are well trained and answer quickly.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
This solution is cheaper than other alternatives.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked into other cloud solutions like Microsoft Cloud and ABS. Our clients chose NSX because they have us as a middleman for support.
What other advice do I have?
I rated this solution a seven because the search button really bothers me. Also, because it isn't always able to finish an operation.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
Solutions Architect at Kepro Solutions Limited
Is scalable, but the initial setup can be complicated
Pros and Cons
- "vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
- "The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."
What is our primary use case?
We use it for hybrid cloud management and orchestration.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for three years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is very good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license.
What other advice do I have?
I would not highly recommend vCloud Director and rate it at seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Senior Professional Services Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Easy to setup and manage, reliable, with a good interface and accessibility
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features are the UI, the interface, and accessibility."
- "In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced."
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
vCloud Director is scalable.
We have over 1000 people in our organization who are using this solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
This is an expensive solution.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Enables us to provision our clients faster but the initial setup was complex
Pros and Cons
- "Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."
- "Initially, the setup was complex."
What is our primary use case?
We use vCloud Director for our customers. They use it to deploy work machine networking and to manage their own applications and backup solutions.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
We would like to see them up the storage.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've been using this solution for more than four years and we have found it to be stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have found it to be scalable. Each year we know they will implement more and more features.
How is customer service and technical support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
Initially, the setup was complex but VMware is working to simplify the integration.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented it ourselves.
What was our ROI?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
Owner at a tech services company
With the resource pool payment model, you pay for resources instead of paying for hourly use. As pure IaaS software, it includes no additional services.
Pros and Cons
- "Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process)."
- "Lacking additional services reduces the level of cloud integration companies just love with Amazon and Azure."
What is most valuable?
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).
How has it helped my organization?
We were able to test Windows desktop OS's (XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10).
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used VCloud Director for over five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The resource pool payment model is very limited when it comes to scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
I rate technical support 6/10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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).
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was straightforward.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We tried Terremark, which was also based on VMware (don't know if they used VCloud Director).
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com)
FT capacity issues are now resolved in vSphere 6.0.
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?
None.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
None.
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.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com) is an official 'Solution Provider' Partner with VMware Inc.
1. Our website link for events: https://www.cloudcounselage.com/events.html
2. Our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/cloudcounselage
3. Our LinkedIn page: www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-counselage
4. Our Twitter page (still new): www.twitter.com/CloudCounselage
Lead Enterprise Systems Architect at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Video Review
Our developers have a straight line to be able to provision resources and help the business move along on new platforms.
Valuable Features
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.
Improvements to My Organization
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.
Room for Improvement
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.
Use of Solution
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 Issues
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.
Scalability Issues
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.
Customer Service and Technical Support
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.
Other Advice
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Even if there are some transition scripts or similar to help move certain aspects of functionality the transition is going to be a painful process.
Summary: vCloud Director, once the flagship product spearheading VMware’s vCloud Suite, is slowly winding down for enterprise customers – potentially leaving some companies with a roadmap challenge.
Having just started work for a cloud service provider in the Channel Islands (Foreshore) my focus has shifted and vCloud Director is a product I’m working with. After VMworld last year I wrote about how badly VMware communicated their product shift away from vCloud Director (vCD) and this year I’ve not seen much sign that communication has improved. At VMworld Barcelona this year only one session out of over 400 was about vCD. Yep. One (although to be fair it was ‘vCD roadmap for service providers’ – more on that later). How the mighty have fallen.
What do we know about the vCD roadmap?
As announced last year the vCloud Suite roadmap involves the current features moving into other products, both in the vCloud Automation Center (now vRealize Automation) and the core vSphere product. It’s likely that the provisioning aspects will go into vCAC (now vRealize Operations) and some of the network functionality (multi-tenancy in particular) will go into the ‘core’ vSphere product. vCloud Director will continue to exist for service providers but for enterprise customers there is a migration to be done. There was also the following statement;
Yes, VMware will offer a product migration path that enables customers and partners to move from vCD to VCAC…
So far, so good.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is it’s been a year since that announcement and there’s been near radio silence since then. If enterprise customers need to transition off vCloud Director then VMware need to provide information, preferably sooner rather than later, on how that’s likely to work.
The last I heard, 2017 was an approximate ‘end of life’ for vCloud Director for enterprises. While that’s a couple of years off that’s not long to transition potentially complex infrastructure, especially when the ‘final destination’ itself is in flux – what will vCAC look like in a couple of years? Presumably NSX (or some version of NSX Lite, backed into the core hypervisor) will provide the multi-tenancy but when? Should companies be buying into these products and gaining familiarity already?
While at VMworld I spoke to various VMware employees and I was told there is a team within VMware who are looking at this challenge. Even if there are some transition scripts or similar to help move certain aspects of functionality the transition is going to be a painful process. I’ll reiterate that everyone I spoke to tried to help and in some cases did make the situation clearer but it seems VMware didn’t send anyone with much knowledge of this to VMworld, and didn’t really plan on communicating anything. Maybe there’s just not enough to tell yet?
Given the timeframes involved I suspect VMware are relying on enterprises adopting vCAC and eventually NSX so that when the time comes to migrate it’s less of an issue.
A clearer roadmap for Service Providers
As I work for a service provider I also wanted to find out more about the roadmap for us. While at VMworld I made it my mission to find out some more information – that’s one of the great things about VMworld, there’s usually an abundance of information. Via the Meet the Expert sessions I spoke to Ninad Desai and Gurusimran Khalsa from VMware who were both very helpful (thanks guys) and I even tried the VMware stand in the Solutions Exchange but they didn’t have anyone to talk about vCD. vCloud Air, VMware’s new flagship offering, is still based on vCD under the hood so at least service providers can be assured that development will be ongoing and aggressive. It’s clear the components and APIs will continue evolving individually (vCNS to NSX for example) but there won’t be a VMware provided GUI to unify them in the same way that vCloud Director has in the past. vCloud Director’s latest release, vCD-SP 5.6, makes it clear that VMware partners will create the GUI going forward;
This was also covered in the single vCD session at VMworld (PAR3096, “New features and interfaces for vCD”) which included the three initial partners offering a front end for vCD (Onapp, Parallels, & AirVM). Unfortunately these third party GUIs will be an extra cost so service providers will have to decide whether they can absorb the increase or have to pass it on to their customers. VMware’s rationale is that a more frequent release cycle (driven by vCloud Air no doubt) justifies existing prices but I can’t help feel that service providers are getting less than we used to for the same cost.
As an aside, I’m still curious as to how partners will compete against vCloud Air despite VMware’s recent recommitment to it’s partner network. Antoni Spiteri thinks it’s all good but for a certain percentage of their partners I’m more inclined towards his earlier post entitled vCHS vs vCloud Providers. VMware will always be able to integrate new features before their partners, they have a larger marketing budget, and more market clout – the only thing VMare don’t have is a global network of datacentres (yet). Data sovereignty is critical to many customers so for the time being that’s enough to keep partners in business but they’re going to have to differentiate more keenly to stay in business.
Final thoughts
For enterprise companies who bought into VMware’s original vision for vCloud Director they can’t transition off the platform overnight – they’re using features which can’t be offered today via another VMware product and it takes considerable time to move to other tools, rewrite code, change processes and reintegrate functionality. Hopefully VMware have a migration plan and it can be better communicated so everyone can plan their roadmaps.
Personally I’m surprised there wasn’t more conversation at VMworld on this topic. Am I missing something? I’d love to hear in the comments.
Further Reading
Flexiant’s 7 reasons not to rely on vCloud Director (though they are obviously a competitor they’re still relevant)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Hi Kapil,
Latest 5.5 version of vSphere has maximum capacity of 512 VMs per Host. This number can vary depending on the size of each individual VMs. For a FC storage, a maximum of 64TB LUN can be attached to a host and a maximum of 256 LUNs can be attached. This number again depends on the size of each individual LUN that is to be attached. Number of volumes and its individual size follows the same maximum conventions that of LUNs.