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reviewer2180859 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Administrator at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
The solution is stable and scalable, but technical support needs to improve its skills
Pros and Cons
  • "The product allows us to add or remove features."
  • "Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution to redeploy sales and achieve standby sales.

What is most valuable?

Kubernetes, Container Service Extension, vRealize Operations, and Object Storage Extension are some of the most valuable features of the solution.

What needs improvement?

Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster. The solution should also improve their documentation.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for eight months.

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VMware Cloud Director
March 2025
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product is stable for now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product is scalable. The product allows us to add or remove features. My team and many of our clients use the product.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support provides fast response.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was moderately complex.

What about the implementation team?

The deployment did not take a long time. The employees in the cloud engineering team deployed the solution. We need five employees from the cloud team to maintain the solution.

What other advice do I have?

Our employees mostly have experience in AWS and Azure, but they do not have any experience in VMware. The product is as good as AWS. We faced issues while integrating our infrastructure with other servers.

Before joining the company, I was working with OpenStack. My job is dedicated to VMware. My company and I need to increase the productivity of our cloud environment. People planning to use the solution should read the documentation very well to understand VMware and how it works. VMware provides good documentation. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Ringo Chau - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Kepro Solutions Limited
Real User
Is scalable, but the initial setup can be complicated
Pros and Cons
  • "vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
  • "The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for hybrid cloud management and orchestration.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using it for three years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is very good.

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
VMware Cloud Director
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware Cloud Director. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Architec1b8b - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Enables us to provision new customers significantly faster and the stability has been rock solid
Pros and Cons
  • "The stability is rock solid."
  • "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."

    What is our primary use case?

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

    How has it helped my organization?

    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. 

    What is most valuable?

    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.

    What needs improvement?

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

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The stability is rock solid. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Their technical support is very good compared to other vendors. 

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    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.

    How was the initial setup?

    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.

    What about the implementation team?

    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.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    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. 

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    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. 

    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
    PeerSpot user
    Computer Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
    Reseller
    Beneficial vitalization, reliable, and simple setup
    Pros and Cons
    • "The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
    • "The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve."

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization.

    What needs improvement?

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

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using vCloud Director for approximately two years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The solution has high availability.

    How are customer service and support?

    The support that is provided is good.

    How was the initial setup?

    The initial setup of vCloud Director is straightforward and takes approximately two days.

    What about the implementation team?

    We use three or four network and infrastructure teams for the deployment of the solution.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The price of the solution is expensive.

    What other advice do I have?

    I rate vCloud Director an eight out of ten.

    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
    PeerSpot user
    Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
    MSP
    It's a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service
    Pros and Cons
    • "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."
    • "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."

    What is our primary use case?

    We are a service partner that offers cloud services based on Cloud Director.

    What is most valuable?

    One valuable feature is the true multitenancy capabilities for the core infrastructure service that Cloud Director provides.

    What needs improvement?

    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.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using Cloud Director since 2012.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    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.

    How are customer service and support?

    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. 

    How was the initial setup?

    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. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    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.

    What other advice do I have?

    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.

    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
    PeerSpot user
    it_user335202 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Lead Enterprise Systems Architect at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Video Review
    Vendor
    Our developers have a straight line to be able to provision resources and help the business move along on new platforms.

    Valuable Features

    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.

    Improvements to My Organization

    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.

    Room for Improvement

    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.

    Use of Solution

    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 Issues

    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.

    Scalability Issues

    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.

    Customer Service and Technical Support

    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.

    Other Advice

    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.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    it_user234723 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Senior Cloud Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
    Vendor
    Even if there are some transition scripts or similar to help move certain aspects of functionality the transition is going to be a painful process.

    Summary: vCloud Director, once the flagship product spearheading VMware’s vCloud Suite, is slowly winding down for enterprise customers – potentially leaving some companies with a roadmap challenge.

    Having just started work for a cloud service provider in the Channel Islands (Foreshore) my focus has shifted and vCloud Director is a product I’m working with. After VMworld last year I wrote about how badly VMware communicated their product shift away from vCloud Director (vCD) and this year I’ve not seen much sign that communication has improved. At VMworld Barcelona this year only one session out of over 400 was about vCD. Yep. One (although to be fair it was ‘vCD roadmap for service providers’ – more on that later). How the mighty have fallen.

    What do we know about the vCD roadmap?

    As announced last year the vCloud Suite roadmap involves the current features moving into other products, both in the vCloud Automation Center (now vRealize Automation) and the core vSphere product. It’s likely that the provisioning aspects will go into vCAC (now vRealize Operations) and some of the network functionality (multi-tenancy in particular) will go into the ‘core’ vSphere product. vCloud Director will continue to exist for service providers but for enterprise customers there is a migration to be done. There was also the following statement;

    Yes, VMware will offer a product migration path that enables customers and partners to move from vCD to VCAC…

    So far, so good.

    So what’s the problem?

    The problem is it’s been a year since that announcement and there’s been near radio silence since then. If enterprise customers need to transition off vCloud Director then VMware need to provide information, preferably sooner rather than later, on how that’s likely to work.

    The last I heard, 2017 was an approximate ‘end of life’ for vCloud Director for enterprises. While that’s a couple of years off that’s not long to transition potentially complex infrastructure, especially when the ‘final destination’ itself is in flux – what will vCAC look like in a couple of years? Presumably NSX (or some version of NSX Lite, backed into the core hypervisor) will provide the multi-tenancy but when? Should companies be buying into these products and gaining familiarity already?

    While at VMworld I spoke to various VMware employees and I was told there is a team within VMware who are looking at this challenge. Even if there are some transition scripts or similar to help move certain aspects of functionality the transition is going to be a painful process. I’ll reiterate that everyone I spoke to tried to help and in some cases did make the situation clearer but it seems VMware didn’t send anyone with much knowledge of this to VMworld, and didn’t really plan on communicating anything. Maybe there’s just not enough to tell yet?

    Given the timeframes involved I suspect VMware are relying on enterprises adopting vCAC and eventually NSX so that when the time comes to migrate it’s less of an issue.

    A clearer roadmap for Service Providers

    As I work for a service provider I also wanted to find out more about the roadmap for us. While at VMworld I made it my mission to find out some more information – that’s one of the great things about VMworld, there’s usually an abundance of information. Via the Meet the Expert sessions I spoke to Ninad Desai and Gurusimran Khalsa from VMware who were both very helpful (thanks guys) and I even tried the VMware stand in the Solutions Exchange but they didn’t have anyone to talk about vCD. vCloud Air, VMware’s new flagship offering, is still based on vCD under the hood so at least service providers can be assured that development will be ongoing and aggressive. It’s clear the components and APIs will continue evolving individually (vCNS to NSX for example) but there won’t be a VMware provided GUI to unify them in the same way that vCloud Director has in the past. vCloud Director’s latest release, vCD-SP 5.6, makes it clear that VMware partners will create the GUI going forward;

    This was also covered in the single vCD session at VMworld (PAR3096, “New features and interfaces for vCD”) which included the three initial partners offering a front end for vCD (Onapp, Parallels, & AirVM). Unfortunately these third party GUIs will be an extra cost so service providers will have to decide whether they can absorb the increase or have to pass it on to their customers. VMware’s rationale is that a more frequent release cycle (driven by vCloud Air no doubt) justifies existing prices but I can’t help feel that service providers are getting less than we used to for the same cost.

    As an aside, I’m still curious as to how partners will compete against vCloud Air despite VMware’s recent recommitment to it’s partner network. Antoni Spiteri thinks it’s all good but for a certain percentage of their partners I’m more inclined towards his earlier post entitled vCHS vs vCloud Providers. VMware will always be able to integrate new features before their partners, they have a larger marketing budget, and more market clout – the only thing VMare don’t have is a global network of datacentres (yet). Data sovereignty is critical to many customers so for the time being that’s enough to keep partners in business but they’re going to have to differentiate more keenly to stay in business.

    Final thoughts

    For enterprise companies who bought into VMware’s original vision for vCloud Director they can’t transition off the platform overnight – they’re using features which can’t be offered today via another VMware product and it takes considerable time to move to other tools, rewrite code, change processes and reintegrate functionality. Hopefully VMware have a migration plan and it can be better communicated so everyone can plan their roadmaps.

    Personally I’m surprised there wasn’t more conversation at VMworld on this topic. Am I missing something? I’d love to hear in the comments.

    Further Reading

    Flexiant’s 7 reasons not to rely on vCloud Director (though they are obviously a competitor they’re still relevant)

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    VMware Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Not cheap but has enabled us to provision our clients faster by around 60%
    Pros and Cons
    • "If a customer is looking for disaster recovery at a cheaper price, this is the best solution."
    • "vCloud Director isn't cheap."

    What is our primary use case?

    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. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    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%.

    What is most valuable?

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

    What needs improvement?

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

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It's generally stable. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It's very scalable. 

    How is customer service and technical support?

    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.

    How was the initial setup?

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

    What about the implementation team?

    We used an integrator who was great. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    vCloud Director isn't cheap.

    What other advice do I have?

    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.

    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
    PeerSpot user
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    Download our free VMware Cloud Director Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: March 2025
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    Download our free VMware Cloud Director Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.