VMware Cloud Director Reviews

Our company uses the solution to create private clouds for customers. The workload editor is applicable for large infrastructures or providers of cloud services. 

The solution is a very robust tool. 

The orchestration and automation are very valuable. 

The GUI console is very easy to use. 

The solution allows for multi-tenants in a single, shared space and that is valuable to customers.  

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. 

I have been using the solution for six years. 

The solution is very stable with no issues. 

The scalability is rated a nine out of ten. 

The support staff used to be very inexperienced but now they are good and the process is simple. 

The initial setup was very complex but now it is very simple.

We implement the solution for customers. 

The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten. 

I recommend the solution and rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have a partnership with vCloud Director, and we are a customer. We run one of the largest private clouds globally.

The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built.

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.

I have been using vCloud Director for seven years.

Once configured, vCloud Director is stable.

vCloud Director needs to be more scalable for private clouds.

I would rate technical support a seven out of ten. Personally, I have a network at VMware that I can connect with when I have a challenge, I can depend on it more than calling their support desk.

Neutral

The initial setup of this solution is not easy. You need to use professional services to be effective. Unfortunately, the skill set for vCloud Director is not easily available, and it cannot be consumed straight out of the box. 

Once deployed, we only require one person to spend twenty minutes a day on maintaining the product.

vCloud Director is an expensive solution. Our organization selects the top tier of the product options, which ensures that we get every feature we want.

The decision to use this solution depends on the size of the organization. A small organization that has less than one hundred servers deploying vCloud Director will find that the cost of running is much cheaper than the product itself. I would not recommend anything above one hundred. However, if you have to constantly change, and you have a dynamic environment, then it would make sense.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten overall.

VMware Cloud Director is the same as VMware Cloud Foundation, so it is almost the same product that we are using across our use cases. One of the tools is used for the public cloud, while the other one is for the private cloud. Overall, my company is happy with this product. VMware Cloud Director is used for the public cloud.

It is a good product when dealing in a multi-tenancy environment.

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.

I have two years of experience working with VMware Cloud Director.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is an easily scalable solution, and it is a feature that is present in the tool by default. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The tool is easy to install.

The solution can be deployed in a maximum of two days with two people.

The tool's ROI is not more than five to ten percent.

If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten. The tool's new pricing is really bad, considering the way the product's cost has changed, resulting in an increase in the cost by five to ten times from what it was previously.

The use cases and the advantages of VMware Cloud Director and VMware Cloud Foundation are the same, but the only thing is our users are different. We are using the tool for our customers.

In our company, we are using it to create our multi-tenancy environment, as it is easy to use and can easily integrate with other solutions.

We don't use any security features of the tool.

Around 50 people are required to maintain the tool. We have a big team, which is a common one managing both,

VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud Director. The tool's maintenance is easy.

The tool's GUI is good and easy to use.

When it comes to reporting, documentation, and analytics, the tool is good. Overall, from the product perspective, it is a good product, so you can keep a high rating for everything related to the solution, including the support area.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution as a cloud service provider for our virtual data center that serves 100 customers. 

We create demands and assign them to customers who run the workloads, access virtual machines, and perform network operations. 

The solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter. 

Multiple events can be managed in the solution's environment.

It is easy to leverage the capabilities for server and network virtualization. 

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

I have been using the solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is good and I rate them a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Our company previously used OpenStack. 

The setup and deployment are rather complex because all networking and storage components need to be included. 

We partnered with the vendor for initial deployment. Our internal team of four included server, network, and VMware administrators. 

The solution provides us with the capability to offer managed services where we realize ROI. 

I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities from the operational, networking, and log-in sides. A mid-high or high license will allow you to deliver all of the features available.

We evaluated the solution against OpenStack and decided to switch. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use the vCloud Director as a multi-tenanted cloud provider, and it's amazing. It makes provisioning new customers so much easier, and our customers are given power over their platform. It gives them the idea that they have a virtual private cloud. It is the main product that we sell in our business.

vCloud Director requires less knowledge to get into in the first place. Therefore, when we bring in new members of staff, we can always give them the customer experience straightaway, and they can pick it up quite easily. This means the training is easy to start with, then we can introduce them to the more advanced features behind the scenes later on.

In terms of disaster recovery (DR), we sell it as a service to our clients. We have our vCloud Directors spanning across two different data centers. We've had some of them that had problems go wrong in one data center with their software. Then, we are able to just move them across with no problems, except for minor downtime. Everything works together, which has been great.

The scalability is amazing. It gives our customers the options that they need. If they suddenly need to add more resources, they don't need to plan for it. They just need to pay us for it, and we can extend it for them.

It's good giving the customers power. Thus, if a customer wants to reboot their server or if their server is hung, they don't need to give us a call. They simply need to log into their portal and reboot it. 

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.

Stability has been great. We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading, but VMware has always stepped in. They have been able to fix everything for us. It's a fantastic product.

The scalability has been very good. We can add more hosts in. We have not had any problems with it so far. 

The technical support is great. We've used VMware support primarily with our upgrades, and they have been great every time. We've had some issues, and they've always been able to fix them in a good time frame.

The initial setup was complex at first, because none of us had dealt with the technology before. However, as we followed documentation and had help from VMware to get us off the ground, it became easier as time went on and we became more familiar with the product.

We deployed it in-house.

Provisioning new clients is normally very quick. It's quite easy just to roll out a new client. The only complicated bit is deploying the service for them afterwards.

VMware was always the way to go because other platforms, like Hyper-V, were already out there, but the products weren't as mature. They didn't have as many features. VMware is very good for HA and disaster recovery. We needed the scalability, because we started as a very small business and VMware allowed us to expand without too much hassle.

It is a great product. It is like magic. It allows you to do so much.

Put it in a lab, and you'll instantly fall in love with it. That's all you need to know. Just give it a go. If you're looking for something that allows your customers to get access to their VMs and stop bothering you, then get in there and try this solution out.

vRealize Orchestrator is a powerful tool. A common query that we get from our customers is they might have issues where their servers are slowing down, but they have no idea why. So, we can pull up all of the graphs and say, “Very clearly your storage is too busy. It has too many IOPS or your CPU is maxing out.” This gives us a sales opportunity, because we can sell them a resource, and hopefully fix their problem.

We don't use the container features.

We use the solution to manage and onboard permission and access on the laptop.

We have limitations on the capabilities of its sender. We send our prospect to speak with the administration through the administrator on their phone. It's very easy for the user but quite tricky for the administration.

They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy.

We can access vCloud Director from the Internet. Once we access it, somebody else can do the same.

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.

I have been using vCloud Director since 2015. We are using the V10 of the solution.

We need to verify compatibility, which is crucial to ensuring stability.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

Two hundred users are using the solution. We plan to increase the use of the vCloud director in the future.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

Sometimes, we encounter challenges with support. When we open a support case, it is handled by representatives from various locations, such as the US or England. The initial response might come from India or elsewhere. Occasionally, we have to reiterate our issue from scratch, which can be frustrating. Ideally, we should get support personnel with historical data to avoid repeating explanations every time we reach out for assistance.

Neutral

The initial setup is very difficult and takes two weeks to complete. Separate coding is very difficult. Ten people are required for the solution's deployment.

We have to prepare, it may only take one or two days. However, we must ensure thorough preparation from the bottom up, starting with the server and setting up a vSphere server. Additionally, we need to prepare some data for vCenter. We can proceed with the installation of the vCloud Director.

I rate the initial setup as three out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The licensing model is fair. The company management is happy because we pay for the services, and they become available. However, it's too expensive. We are considering changing our solution.

I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

When scanning thoroughly, we integrate automation. It would be easier if VMware improved its capabilities. Then, we can implement autoscaling through the web interface.

There is multi-channel support, yet Net Depot is used for security and monitoring. This is crucial if we expose profiles to the Internet for security reasons. We need to enhance security, especially in protecting vCloud Director. If anyone pushes or plugs in something, it could compromise customer access. VMware may be better prepared for security reasons.

Two persons are required to maintain the solution.

If we only have a small amount of resources, we'll opt for the public vCloud but if we have a large amount of resources like 100s, 1000s then vCloud Director might be a better solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The real multi tenancy and distributed administration for vDCs is the goal of this product, which combines consuming resources as a service with a great governance model for different customers.

Suppose you need to build one or more virtual datacenter, and meet the demands of customers, supplier and departments. In a traditional architecture (vCenter and esxi hosts) you need hard integration work to answer this problem.

vCloud director solves this problem weaving computational resources, storage and networking with consumption requests from companies, departments and individual operators in a dynamic and safe way.

We combine this architecture with existing vDCs with limited business impact (because vMotion could aid to limit or eliminate downtime). Now selling VM, request demo or trying an environment is very simple: just a few clicks to go!

Improvement in IT departments regarding the delivery of virtual datacenters for Business, Government and Captive area (holding headquarters and associated companies). Hospitals and Governments could use this because data is under their control, with very low risks for stability and security: governance still remains with the cloud consumer.

In my scenario I'm using 2 vDCs (marked as gold and platinum) in 2 different places and allow an organization (our customer) to use parts of these vDCs to stretch VM distribution across a datacenter, make DR on-demand (and without up-front costs) and respond quickly to business demands.

I've been using this solution for 3 years.

Deployment is very simple, but I suggest a little design and hardening phase to meet security and licensing compliance.

Product is mature enough to support huge loads: the underlining technology is the best in class to meet many customer needs. The product is very stable.

Product is born to be scalable, because it should be used in different modes (cloud provider and private cloud environment).

People say that VMware customer service is very helpful and quick to solve issues. In my life I've use this service only for administrative issues (contracts, portals, licensing); this is because documentation, their knowledge base and community always are enough for problem solving.

Official documentation is very good, and could give you skill to deploy, run and improve your vCD system (VMware always work hard for this phase).

Setup was quite straightforward, because VMware always provides great documentation for deployment, configuration and troubleshooting.

I deployed and set up this system in-house (my team staff: virtualization area), because this is a company core-business, and it is the minimum to do to learn and solve problems quickly.

Our ROI was reached considering 2 factors:

- A service provider model built on VMWare contracts and many resource delivery models, cost are as-a-service and bound to the VM vRAM: licensing cost is 1:1 to the assigned resource. Considering 50% of infrastructure cost per VM in 3 years, 10% of VMware cost and 10% of infrastructure cost, break even could be in 1.5 years.

- In both private and public scenarios many administrative tasks are solved by on-demand models that could be elastic and efficient. Considered a manpower reduction of about 40% and a potential reduction of 99% for provisioning tasks. IT Virtual administrator staff finally do the real job: troubleshoot, provision and do only heavy activities with less effort.

One more important thing: vCloud works with his chargeback product to show and take many costs under control.

As mentioned above, the service provider model costs are calculated considering:

- physical environment cost (up front cost or by loan)

- licensing cost 1:1 to vRAM

- setup requires no more than 1 week.

Before installing vCloud director, I suggest:

1. Check HCL and compatibility matrix between vCloud director, vSphere and vCloud network and security (ex: vShield manager)

2. Use vDC resources only for vCloud director purpose, don't mix traditional vSphere and vCloud director usage.

We use VMware Cloud Director on our big service providers that allow different tenants to coexist from the same operational infrastructure. Each of our customers has their own tenant, so we can manage their workloads separately.

Offloading workloads to such large platforms allows for better economies of scale, facilitating management from a customer perspective that does not need to maintain their own infrastructure.

The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable. You can do a lot with NSX, which is the VMware component that manages all networking. It integrates well with enterprise-level backup solutions, like Veeam or Vault.

VMware should simplify the whole solution as it comprises many different components, making management hard. Reducing the number of components would make it easier to manage.

Currently, it's more or less a year.

It is really reliable and works well.

As a technician, it's easier to work on VMware because there are many online sources for support, and it has more maturity on the market. At Nutanix, you need a lot of support from a partner, whereas the engagement with a partner for VMware is much less.

Positive

I'm considering that it might be worth looking into Nutanix since they are new in the market.

We work hand in hand with our customers to work on primarily Big Cloud Director platforms.

Since Broadcom's acquisition, the prices of VMware solutions have changed a lot. I'm mostly technical and don't deal much with budgeting and billing, so I can't really judge them.

I did evaluate other solutions like Nutanix.

Starting from scratch, it could be worth looking into Nutanix. The VMware acquisition by Broadcom has left some uncertainty, and Broadcom did a terrible PR job following the acquisition.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.