vCloud Director or vRealize Automation?

[c10gue]

Hi,

I was hoping I could get a little advice regarding choosing between vCloud Director and vRealize Automation. We have implemented a test environment for vCloud Director however reading a few articles it seems that it's a product that is coming to end of life for enterprise but not for service providers.

So my question is as a service provider should we be implementing vCloud Director or vRealize Automation? We don't want to be in the position of migrating off vCloud in a years time.

Any advise would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris

[IamTHEvilONE]

Yes, vCloud Director is End of Life for Enterprise customers.  As of yesterday, we announced that vCloud Director will no longer be part of the license in the vCloud Suite 6.x generation.

vRealize Automation is the intended successor for those who currently use vCloud Director.

See here: vCloud Director Convergence and Transition Plan - What's the Scoop? | VMware vSphere Blog -...

[c10gue]

Just to confirm that you think we should go with vRealize Automation over vCloud Director?

Looking at the bottom of the article you sent it says:

SERVICE PROVIDERS – vCD will continue to be available through the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) in the cloud bundle and is still the recommended solution for service providers. VMware will continue on-going  development for vCD to meet the specific needs of service providers and will provide further details at a later date.

But that was from 2013.

Thanks for your reply by the way

[IamTHEvilONE · Accepted solution]

I can't make any sort of recommendation between the two, given that I don't know what you want do to with the products.

Speaking to availability of product and support of it:

vCloud Director just won't be available for you to purchase independently, and has been removed from the Suite license as of 6.x.  You'd have to buy the 5.x license to get it (assuming that's available) .... From that aspect, if it doesn't suite your needs from now until mid-2017 (when vCloud will be end of support for Enterprise users).  As of 2017, you'll need to come to a decision as to what will replace vCloud or continue to use vCloud Director even though we won't offer support for it any more.

Will vRealize Automation meet your needs?  I don't know without knowing your use case and requirements ... that discussion is for a VMware Sales Rep.

Aside from all this:  VSPP is the VMware Service Provider Program.  A version of vCloud Director will exist for them, but it is specifically for them (members of the VSPP program).  So unless you work for a member of the VSPP program, the statements above about vCloud Director are what you need to think about.

If you are a VSPP member, then vCloud Director for Service Providers (5.6.x) is available as the direct successor for vCloud Director 5.5.x.  Then by all means we will continue to support these versions, and it can be the basis to manage resources as a Cloud Provider.

I have had a number of people say they are Service Providers, which is fine and well.  Being a VSPP means being in a specific VMware Program, which will grant access to certain things (one of which is vCloud for Service Providers afaik).

I'm not trying to be stern or terse here, but just want to make sure we make key differentiation about what is available to whom and how.

[c10gue]

No that's great thanks.

We are VSPP so we do have access to vCloud Director.

Again thanks for the response.

[IamTHEvilONE]

Glad to be of help.

[tw1984]

So, if you are removing vCloud Director from the vCloud Suite, does that also mean that vCNS will be removed as well?

[Btolaiya]

I have a similar question. We had piloted VMware LAB Manager a few years back , and knowing that it had reached end of life, we are revisiting our options and since our use case has changed a bit.

We want to do a comparison with Microsoft Azure DevTestLabs

We would like to explore our options with SDDC , software defined Data Center , We are looking to explore a couple of use cases, automation is one and another is maybe providing a platform for development with the flexibility and control that they would need to work on that environment and also for us as admins to be able to maintain this development environment .

Giving developers more control over restarting, stopping, deleting VM’s etc without giving them vCenter access .

Hope that makes sense.