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VMware Cloud Director

Score8.5 out of 10

19 Reviews and Ratings

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What is VMware Cloud Director?

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director) is a cloud service-delivery platform used by cloud providers to operate and manage cloud-service businesses. The vendor states that by using VMware Cloud Director, cloud providers deliver secure, efficient, and elastic cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about VMware Cloud Director.
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Cloud Director saves time, so you can go for an extra cup of coffee 😉

Incentivized
Verified User
Technician in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a cloud provider and we use Cloud director as the main entrance for our customers to access there VMware environment. From there they can do everything within there environment and go to Availability if there is a need voor a failover or migration.
As admin you can set limitations to the origination of a customer (like max CPU, memory and storage use) and set also the needed rights. Within the organization, the organization admin (de customer) can set his own set of user rights to his users.
Because the end user can do som much itself on a safe way, it safes us a lot of time and we know it secure.

Pros

  • Seperate organizations (customers)
  • Give end user the freedom to make new users in his own organization
  • Quotes on the organization (cpu, memory, storage), set Limits so the hardware underneath will not be over asked
  • The integration with Availability
  • Integration with multiple cloud director sites (you can just open one site but can enter all the other sites from there too)

Cons

  • Logging, there is a lot of logging but is not always clear where to look for the right logging.
  • The syncing of policy, you can't see if or what he did/didn't sync and the status of it.
  • More integrations with VMware product (click like Availability)

Most Important Features

  • Availability and scalability
  • Manageability, the organization, customers, products
  • Visibility of resource usage
  • Very secure, the rights are very good set. So customers do not interfere with each other

Return on Investment

  • Saves a lot of time, and time is money
  • Stable, so little to non downtime
  • With P1 , good support

Other Software Used

Cohesity DataProtect, Zerto, VMware vCenter Server

Friendly cloud user interface for his own virtual data center

Incentivized
Raffaello PoltronieriView profile
Cloud Solutions Architect in Information Technology at Clouditalia Telecomunicazioni (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Building virtual racks
  • Managing the customers' network and security
  • Simplicity but the completeness of IaaS solution
  • Integration with major software providers

Cons

  • Backup
  • integration with SDS different than vSAN
  • Manage more granularly users

Return on Investment

  • Time to market = 0 means profits almost immediate after investment
  • Customers trust the VMware brand more than any other
  • Elasticity: allowing the company to choose the best HW in the lower layer

Other Software Used

vRealize Operations, VMware NSX, Zerto Virtual Replication

Costly but worth the money.

Incentivized
Michael O'RileyView profile
Director of Information Technology in Information Technology at International Food Protection Training Institute (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • The advantage to using vCloud Director is it a cloud based application allowing access anywhere. I have the ability to make changes to our virtual environment without being in the office or using a vpn.
  • The vCloud Director provides a lot of the same features as vSphere.

Cons

  • The add-on/extension required on the internet browser sometimes are difficult to get working at first. We've experience instances where the add-on/extension latest versions will not work and have to downgrade to an older version.
  • The server console lacks features and tools. For example it would be useful to have a copy and paste tool or a file upload tool.
  • The vCloud Director management site uses Adobe Flash, which makes it impossible to use on a mobile device.

Return on Investment

  • vCloud Director requires less IT administration. For example, there isn't a need to maintain esx host. or storage administration like creating luns.
  • A negative impact is cost. vCloud Director has a monthly cost for storage, processor core, memory, and licensing.

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V

Other Software Used

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SQL Server

JW Review

Incentivized
John WellenView profile
Cloud Technical Lead in Information Technology at Datalink (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Manages multi-tenancy very well. You can setup resource pools of compute, network, and storage that are independent of each other.
  • Easy to create and manage multiple environments.
  • Has lease management technology and can easily set leases and expire them based on pre-configured time frames.

Cons

  • It is not good for end users or customers to use. The UI is geared more towards VMware admins.
  • There is somewhat of a learning curve to it, you have to think through and plan out how you want to set your OVDC and PVDCs up. It takes a lot of architecture experience.
  • Once you built workloads in vCloud director, it's real difficult to take them out or manage them directly in vSphere. This is a huge pain.

Return on Investment

  • Faster deployment of workloads
  • Better utilization of resources through the ability of managing leases
  • Ability to deploy multi-tenant environments that are exclusive to one another