VMware Cloud Director Reviews

We are a service provider. We offer business integration, application and infrastructure outsourcing, innovative solutions and strategic consultancy to private businesses. We offer the cloud service-delivery platform vCloud Director as an example of one of our products. 

vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's a VMware product. The majority of our customers already have this product on-prem; they are happy to use the same solution also in our cloud environment.

Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions.

It is a very stable solution.

My impressions of the scalability of vCloud Director are all positive.

Up until today, everything has been running smoothly. We haven't needed to contact the technical support team.

The initial setup was completed four years ago; the deployment was not straightforward or easy from what I can recall. We've installed the environment this year and it was quite straightforward. Much easier than five years ago.

I can't remember what our setup costs were. I know we paid in VSPP points. Our contract covers other environments so it's not something I monitor.

My only additional commentary has to do with the making improvements to the user interface.

If I was to give vCloud Director a rating from one to ten, 10 being the best, I'd give it an 8 based on the fact that it's stable, our customers seem to like it, and we can manage it quite easily.

We using it for the public cloud.

The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it.

We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features.

vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync.

It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions. However, we are managing it.

The scalability works as it should.

The technical support could be better. We managing with the current support though.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup is complex as we have our own customized portals which we integrated with the product. It's quite a complex solution.

We did the deployment in-house.

The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions.

Do a proof a concept before making a decision.

Our primary use case for this solution is to onboard multiple customers into a multi-tenant platform.

My company's a traditional hardware reseller so moving into a subscription-based model is challenging from a sales perspective. It's a new way of getting customers in and getting them tightly coupled with my company.

The self-service capabilities have affected the way that our customers can now do their own thing. Whereas in our old legacy platform, we had to sit down and do stuff for our customers. We don't require as many people to maintain the platform. 

It has also enabled us to provision new clients faster. We can provision a new customer in a few hours and they will be up and running. 

The multi-tenancy feature is very important for us from a service perspective. The recent new capabilities are a huge step forward for this product.

The data protection, disaster recovery, and container features are limited but evolving as well. We use some third party products for data protection and disaster recovery.

I would like to see a full transition to NSX-T, more work on the container, and double integration.

The stability is rock solid. 

We're still a small, newly started service provider so we haven't had a lot of scale yet. 

Their technical support is very good compared to other vendors. 

The main reason that we switched solutions was that we were running a legacy based infrastructure as a service. Customers had to submit a ticket and then we did something in the background for the customer. They requested self-service capabilities, so that was the main reason we knew it was time to switch.

The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better.

I implemented it myself. I designed and deployed the solution myself because I have a long background with VMware. We haven't used any external companies for implementation.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to get people who understand the technology and what you can do with it to get the program right the first time. You can make a lot of mistakes during the deployment. Get someone in there to help you if you don't understand the product 100 percent. 

I rated this solution an eight. I believe that everything has room for improvement and wouldn't give any solution a ten. 

We only looked at VMware. We looked at alternatives like OnApp but we saw that VMware was moving forward with a lot of innovation on the vCloud Director and stuck to that. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for infrastructure as a service, which is pretty much a self service, together with a period of management if the customer needs. We are partners with vCloud Director and I'm the manager of virtualization, storage and backup.

As a service provider, it is key for us to have control over the overall cost of ownership, as well as providing benefits, good service and making a profit. With the help of vCloud Director, we have been able to provide really good multi-tenanted services, making the best use of existing hardware and investments, but reducing our overall CapEx very heavily. As an organization, it has really helped us to sustain a service and continues to help us leave a mark on the market.

I think it's a wonderful product. I like the latest features of extensibility, which allows integration of other services and enables us to go beyond infrastructure as a service. We are now in a position where we can also offer platform as a service to our customers. That's a really wonderful feature. Extensibility allows service providers to extend their existing services and integrate them within the vCloud, offering a feature with an overall solution to customers. 

One of the elements lacking in the product is integration with the hyperscalers. Using hybrid cloud requires connectivity to other public clouds like Azure or AWS. At the moment that is not possible. If that can be made available as a feature, I think vCloud would become a one-stop shop for everything. We would be able to give a true hybrid service from a single pane of glass, offer everything from a single portal. It becomes a cloud management platform rather than just a simple IaaS natively from VMware. 

Additional features I'd like to see would be flexibility in terms of user permissions rules. I'd also like to see the capability to integrate on-prem dedicated virtual centers within vCloud. There is a CPOM feature which enables integration on-prem with the existing customer into the same portal. At the moment it is very limited, just providing a view. It would be good if we had the capability to make changes from the same portal. Multi-site capabilities would be another additional feature. It is offered but there is room for improvement in terms of other features and functionalities that can be brought in, which would make it more seamless. 

The dashboard for monitoring is very limited and it's not provided out of the box. It's done using a different tool from VMware itself. Having those rich dashboards within the portal itself, directly providing monitoring of the virtual machines, would be great. That is something which is really missing. Performance metrics were completely missing till now. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

The solution is quite stable now, a lot better than it used to be. There are certain issues in terms of making changes at the backend but I have seen a big improvement from previous versions.

Scalability as an option was not available earlier. It's possible now but still needs some improvement. We have 300-plus customers and around 10,000-plus virtual machines being hosted. This solution is our main cloud portfolio offering so we use it on a regular basis.

I think we have had fantastic support from VMware. We don't use them very often now because it is quite a stable product. They have very knowledgeable support staff. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward with the new enhancements. It could be improved in terms of how the database's high availability is taken into account. They can still streamline the installation process but compared to when it was launched, it's much better now. With the recent availability of cloud provider hub and cloud foundation, I think deployment can be very easily done within a couple of days and that includes all the planning. 

As a service provider, it gives us quite good leverage and flexibility to present our own pricing and create pricing policies, which is really good. 

It's important to have some development capabilities within your organization I think the most important thing is to understand your requirements and what your end goal is because you need to understand whether vCloud Director is going to restrict you or not. It's a very powerful product for service providers. You also need to keep in mind what other service add-ons you want to achieve because your overall design and architecture or blueprint is very dependent on what you want to do. Having a blueprint will provide you with the difference between a wonderful outcome or an unstable one. We've been using this solution a long time so I would suggest that if you want to be in the current market scenario and keep yourself alive, a product like vCloud Director can definitely help you sustain yourself. It keeps you up with the new trends and up to date on your portfolios as well. The fact that we can now go beyond infrastructure as a service is great. We can now expand and be a more versatile provider giving application as a service from a single portal. 

In today's scenario, hybrid cloud and hybrid connectivity is what is really very important. Although Cloud Director provides that sort of connectivity, it is limited within VMware products. If we could hook up with hyperscalers like Azure, Google or AWS, I would give this solution a higher rating.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We use it in a new data center. 

The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud Director. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice.

In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version.

The stability is good.

The scalability is the best part.

Our customer wanted to deliver a host and new services. We discussed what would be good solution and thought that vCloud Director would work.

It has enabled us to provision new clients faster. We don't have to configure a new host nor configure a new VM. We just have to secure it.

It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost.

I would recommend, especially with the new features coming out in versions 8.0 and 9.0.

Ability to give our developers a self-service environment, where they can go on particular portal and deploy their own systems.

Automation piece. If we can continue to develop automation for developers, that should seamlessly carry over into product environment as well without admin heavy lifting. In automation, there's still a lot of manual processes, but with vCloud, less so.

I don’t see any improvements that could be made based on the way we use it. Maybe some built-in third-party tools that we’re using now in terms of automation (i.e. Bamboo) would be an improvement.

We’ve already deployed three-tiered applications with just a push of a button to deploy from dev to staging to production.

In regards to stability, this gives you more control yet takes out the human element. There’s consistency that’s set in the script and then we can make small changes as we grow.

They’re now moving more into vRealize and more integrated systems. It used to need more scripting, but VMware are now working more hand in hand with other solutions.

Great tech support. I love those guys. Every time I had a ticket, I could escalate, and they’d work in tandem with other vendors (i.e. NetApp) to find solution.

I wasn't part of initial set-up, but I believe it’s complex based on the senior engineer’s experience.

For example, right now the metrics to upgrade is complex, requiring certain elements. It’s very simple to use and train end-users. In our shop, we try to make them more self-sufficient, so a lot of knowledge transfer.

Access the enormous amount of virtual apps they have to get practical performance instead of just the KB to deploy. They also need to get an understanding of audience as well. Understand pain points to understand how to approach solution.

It loses points because things are moving so quickly that it has yet to catch up.

Our primary use case is for the public cloud. We offer public cloud to various customers. The idea is to offer a cheap public cloud service. 

vCloud has improved our organization because it acts as a DR between the customer's premise to the public cloud. If a customer is looking for disaster recovery at a cheaper price, this is the best solution. 

The self-service capability has been beneficial for my organization. Although we have a problem because it cannot support automation from A to Z. There is a lot of missing. 

This solution has enabled us to provision our clients faster by around 60%.

ESG is one of the most valuable features. It deals with networking, traffic, and the security of some features like load balancer.

I would like to see automation for creating data centers and IP management. That would make it easier for customers.

It's generally stable. 

It's very scalable. 

The problem with vCloud Director is that there are not enough GSS engineers who can support us. Every time that I try to open a ticket with GSS support, they ask me to wait until the next day. If I try to open a ticket with another product like vSphere or vSAN I will get a quick answer.

vCloud Availability is hard to install but vCloud Director is easy to install.

We used an integrator who was great. 

vCloud Director isn't cheap.

I would rate this solution a six because, from the end-user experience, it's hard to deal with the portal compared to other solutions like OpenStack.