Item: VMware Cloud Director
Rating: 9
Author: Michael O'Riley

Overall Satisfaction with vCloud Director

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

vCloud Director is being used to manage our VMware virtual
server environment. It allows for an easier process creating virtual machines
or complete configuration changes. A challenge we faced was migrating
our existing Hyper-V virtual servers overs to vCloud environment.

Pros and Cons

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

Hyper-V is built on a Windows platform that includes services not needed for the virtual environment adding overhead. With vCloud I'm not required to maintain a host OS or it's updates. The requirement to maintain storage devices is no longer needed with vCloud as well.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

vCloud Director is well suited for a multi tenant environment. It's great for an organization that does not have an internal IT resource or limited IT. vCloud might not be a great fit for a large organization that requires a lot of processing cores. Another expensive piece is storage you lose the opportunity to shop different storage solutions. Migrating a virtual infrastructure to vCloud will be slower because transfer rates will be limited by internet bandwidth.

VMware Cloud Director Feature Ratings

Comments

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Costly but worth the money.