VMware Cloud Director Reviews

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.