What needs improvement with vCloud Director?

It lacks some of the capabilities offered by storage tools like Amazon S3, making it an area that needs improvement. Having features related to Amazon S3 in VMware Cloud Director is one of the areas our company desires. The tool's price is one of the challenges we faced with the solution, making it an area requiring improvement.

vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited.

The product's UI has certain shortcomings that require improvement. The mouse pointer displays some pop-ups instead of covering the content I want to click and actually see.

The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it.

The data probability is advanced for the monitoring surface and the application. We need to improve the physical data for monitoring and understanding scalability with automation for autoscaling.

The solution's installation is difficult, and you need somebody with the solution's knowledge to do the installation.

Over the past two years, VMware transitioned from vSphere 6.3 to 2016, which presented challenges for us. The migration from VTT was particularly difficult, prompting us to reconsider the solution's architecture. VMware occasionally makes decisions that impact customers and alter workflow, necessitating adjustments to features and processes. It would be beneficial if VMware maintained greater backward compatibility in their technology upgrades, ensuring smoother transitions and minimizing disruptions for users. It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security. While such options exist, they are inadequately documented, requiring experimentation with uncertain outcomes. We seek clearer documentation and smoother integration processes to minimize risks and ensure functionality when incorporating third-party solutions.

As my company started off with the product a few months ago, we have not faced any issues and are still exploring the tool's functionalities. The interface of the product is okay. Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required. My company is still exploring the aforementioned area of the product. I feel the product is continuously evolving. I can't comment on whether VMware needs to focus on marketing efforts to promote its products since it is in the transition phase after Broadcom purchased it. My company is waiting to see what is going to happen next. VMware purchases Broadcom, and I don't know if, under the new management, the changes that will be made are going to be beneficial to customers or not, so it depends on how Broadcom is going to play the game.

The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive. So, there is room for improvement in terms of pricing. Another thing that could be improved is the support. Sometimes, the response takes a long time, and the advice they provide could be better.

vCloud Director should include better billing options for businesses like mine or more options for customers to see their usage and billing situation regarding the usage of vCloud Director. vCloud Director's graphical user interface should be made easier.

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

It would be great if Microsoft and VMware come together and become a common tool.

The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve.

The blueprint that allows customers to create their own images for deployment services needs some improvement. The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated. Currently, the solution only offers this option for their own VMware. Other products like Red Hat allow you to automate anything.

The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack.

We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve.

vCloud Director should focus on helping customers sustain their private clouds and scale out when necessary. The solution has some basic functionalities and a few functional services. They are working to orchestrate between public and private clouds. While this is good, I think they need to enable private clouds to ensure that they are competing in the market of public clouds. For us, the cost of a public cloud is seven times more expensive than what we build and consume. They also should consider bringing in significant upgrades like SNS features. Database services need to go beyond what they are currently doing.

The integration between components could be improved. The cloud solution does not comprise a single product. If you look at Azure or AWS, they have tightly integrated all the components in the backend, and they just provide a UI. With VMware, we just have to integrate all products of VMware together and then provide a UI to the customer. If some component of the UI isn't working, in the backend we have to find out, is this vCloud availability the problem? Or is RabbitMQ the problem? This kind of integration is supposed to be done by the service provider, but the integration should be pretty tight between all the components, which form a private cloud.

We get too many errors, whether it's the URL not working or errors in some of the UI features. I think it needs to be more stable.

It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI.

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.

This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis.

We are a service provider, and every day, new customers come to us needing advanced features like platform features. For example, some of them need a managed hosting setup like Beanstalk, or some of them need microservices, like container or Kubernetes, or serverless types of things. So we are in discussions with the concerned teams at VMware in order to incorporate the platform services for next year. There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products. We are not happy with the frequent upgrades. Because we are a government department, we find it quite difficult to accommodate the frequent changes. What we would like is for the changes to be less frequent, at least twice a year or once a year, so that we can accommodate that in our budget plans. We make budgets annually, not quarterly. I think they need to have a better roadmap for future offerings and future technologies.

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.

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.

The first thing that I would say if someone asked me for what nice feature I would like to see, it would be a billing feature. To be able to automate our billing for clients would be a nice feature for us and save us a lot of time.

In the virtualization aspect, we are happy, but if we work on the public cloud, not the private cloud.OpenStack has a lot of features. In OpenShift when you configure it you can provide 100 web service in redundancy mode. This is very simple in OpenShift. We are happy with vCloud in terms of the virtualization but not for redundancy and distribution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features.

I've seen that there are more HTML5 bits coming in. With that, it's exposing more of the NSX. So, if they keep going in the same direction where they give more features under the hood in vSphere to be exposed to the vCloud Director, that would be great. The bits they've done so far as we've been going forward into the vSphere 6.5 have been good. I would like them to just keep doing what they are doing going forward.

We would like to see them up the storage.

I would like to see Business recovery and integration with SD-WAN.

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.

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