vCloud Director

What do you like best?

Depending on your needs you can use vCloud Director to create your environment, without worrying about the physical dependencies as long has you have been provided the resources. You can create your services as you would on-premises,

vCloud Director can also be a solution for Disaster Recovery, if you have your VMs locally or in another provider you can replicate the workloads to vCloud Director and from there run your recovery procedure.

If you are a Service Provider then this a multi-tenant platform that allows you to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It has policy-based control to manage the diferent tenants while keeping data segregation and security.

What do you dislike?

The dependency of flash client that is not compatible with all of the operating systems, such as linux.

Some operations such as downloading VMs are a bit tricky to perform.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

The new versions can be deployed as an appliance and the requirement for an external database has been removed,now all of the services are available in a single appliance.

This product itself is not a full competitor for AWS or Azure, but it can be extended with another product vRealize automation.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

vCloud Director allows us to provide our customers with a platform that is stable and secure to house their services with the minimal of user interaction. We just need to fill the Catalog with the services that the customer wants, from there the customer is autonomous.