VMware Cloud Director Reviews

We use it for hybrid cloud management and orchestration.

I've been using it for three years.

vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks.

The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license.

I would not highly recommend vCloud Director and rate it at seven out of ten.

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.

We use vCloud Director as a multiple cloud management solution.

This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis.

I have been using vCloud Director within 12 months.

The solution is stable but could improve.

I have found the solution scales well.

The support responsiveness has been satisfactory.

The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license.

We are evaluating Dynamics from Cisco to perhaps replace this solution.

We are looking for another solution that meets our needs.

I rate vCloud Director a seven out of ten.

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 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 our clients to manage their infrastructure.

This solution has helped us make money and provision our clients faster. 

We have found the multi-tenants to be a valuable feature. 

I think that the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features are the future. We work with the cloud Availability product. We want our clients to use it but we have had a lot of problems with it so we'll wait for the next version. 

It's very stable.

Scalability is stable. I have the ability to scale horizontally. 

The GSS engineers are good. 

We analyzed the markets and our clients. We gathered some feedback from our clients and after that, we decided on this solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We integrated in-house. 

vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool. 

We looked at VMware and Open Source.

I would rate this solution an eight. It has a lot of features in the roadmap, maybe in a few years, I can give it a ten. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to test your environment and to determine whether or not this solution is suitable for you. This solution was a good decision for our clients and we get good feedback from them. 

Our primary use case is for the cloud project and we have utilized it very well so far. 

Working with a single vendor, especially with optimization, has improved our organization. Working with VMware has supported us especially in terms of building a very powerful cloud for our customers.

It has helped us provision new clients faster because it's built on an automated system. It has helped speed up provisioning around 75%.

We have found the whole suite of cloud applications to be the most valuable features. If you start a cloud, either private or hybrid, it will support you and you will get more features. It covers support in terms of computing, networking, and everything.

The self-service feature has helped migrate a new customer from on-premise infrastructure to on-cloud.

It's stable enough to run a business on it. 

Scalability is very good. You can scale up and out. 

Their technical support is very solid, we have a good relationship with them. So far, we haven't had any issues with them.

It can be easy to deploy but there is some complexity in terms of the configuration.

We used a consultant to integrate. 

Working with VMware is different than working with Microsoft SPLA. SPLA is only for service provider level agreement. However, for VMware, you can work in different aspects. With VMware you can build an infrastructure whereas SPLA you can sign and have your licenses for building your infrastructure later on. You can't have the best of both worlds. VMware is better in terms of cost than Microsoft.

I would rate this solution an eight. So far we are satisfied with it, but there are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support. So far they have helped us very well.

I would tell someone looking into this or a similar solution that before deploying any cloud, you need to have a good consultant that can help you to build the cloud well, especially from the start and especially with the infrastructure. There are a lot of components that need to be taken into consideration before doing this.

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.