Wednesday, June 19, 2013
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Cloud Infrastructure Suite Feedback Needed

Friends, Romans, Countrymen….Lend me your Ear!  Wait, that was something completely different, BUT the premise is the same.

As part of my role at VMware I will be attending an internal summit in Palo Alto later this month.  Being a “Cloud Guy” I have been asked to gather some candid, yet useful feedback on the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite.  The goal here is to provide direct, honest and constructive feedback, including marketing positioning, product features/bugs, etc…  This is your chance to help drive the products through me as a conduit.  What I am looking for is some of the following:

  • Direct Customer Feedback you have heard yourselves.
  • Projects you’ve worked on that yield key feedback.  These could be customer projects if you’re a partner, or personal projects if you are doing lots of work in an area yourself.

I would like to have these captured in the comments section of this post and I will aggregate them as needed to roll up to the folks I will be meeting with.  I would have about 15-20 minutes to present YOUR feedback.  All  I ask is we all keep it constructive, useful, and use critical thought to help drive some things you would like to see with the what VMware is doing with the Cloud Infrastructure Suite.

The timeline for this can run for about a week so I will have time to gather the comments, but please don’t stop adding.  I will do what I can up to the last minute to compile your comments.  Please forward this to others you know as well!  You can also include some thoughts on the Cloud Management too and I will try to include that.

Let the comments BEGIN!  GO!

Please stay professional and courteous!

 

About Chris Colotti

Chris is currently a Consulting Architect in the Pre-Sales Solutions group of the Global Services Organization at VMware. He focuses on designing and integrating Cloud solutions for the field and VMware customers. Chris is amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers. Most recently Chris has become heavily involved with fitness as a Team Beachbody Coach through P90X and other Beachbody Programs. Although Technology is his day job, Chris is passionate about fitness after losing 60 pounds himself in the last few years. Now he spreads both the word of technology and fitness along with the Team Beachbody Business through both his blogs.

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  • http://twitter.com/mlaakness Mike Laak

    I think this has been said before but we could definitely use the ability to take snapshots from the vCD interface. I’m sure there are a ton of technical hurdles to overcome like running into storage limits, etc. but it would be a useful feature.

  • Rotem Agmon

    My customers would like to see tight integration between VMware vCloud Director and VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) products.
    While using SRM to protect the management infrastructure of vCloud Director is supported, SRM does not currently support protection of virtual machines deployed within vCloud resource pools.
    I would claim that the current lack of tight integration greatly affects the adoption rate of VMware vCloud Director among our customer base.

  • David Davis

    Here’s my short list, off the top of my head-
    - vCD is too complex to install – WAY too complex
    - There should be a vCenter and vCD “lite” version that installs, as one, as an appliance
    - That “lite” version would make private cloud easy and affordable (I hope) for ALL companies. This is needed because private cloud shouldn’t just be an “add on only for the large enterprise”, businesses of all sizes could benefit for things like self-service (heck, I’d like it even for me, as a VMware Admin)
    - tight integration between vCenter and vCD – it should be designed that they are never out of sync to begin with, preventing you from ever, say, deleting a HA/DRS cluster from the vSphere client that trashes your vCD VDC
    You are much more of an expert on this than I so I welcome you thoughts.
    Thanks!
    David

    • http://twitter.com/mlaakness Mike Laak

      I like David’s idea for something that could target smaller markets for Private Clouds.

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    I’d like to see some better tools for identifying orphaned objects between vCloud & vSphere. I have written some scripts to identify some items but I think something in gui for this could be useful to allow orphaned vSphere objects to be deleted and vice versa

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    In Chargeback, the “System Health” tab shows green for the VSM data collector even if it can ‘t connect to VSM!

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    In Chargeback there is no staging in VSM for bandwidth data. If for any reason some samples are missed then they are not re-collected. I guess this would require some re-engineering of VSM to include a database table/file to keep a period of historical data samples.

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    It would be good to see better support for the .Net SDK for both vCloud & vSphere (the vSphere one doesn’t even work as far as I know). We are building some core hosting services around these and it would be good to know we can get support for bug fixes (there are a few I know of in the vCloud SDK at least)

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    As a general note, I have noticed that VMware use (in my opinion) far too many config files across the product suite. vSphere alone has many config files for single Windows services which contain the same config items (hostname for example). Some kind of “Configuration Platform” which could be used across products would seem like a good idea.

  • http://twitter.com/CloudAche84 Tim Lawrence

    The gui should be supported in any HTML 5 browser. The upload client should be HTML5 if possible and thusly not reliant on JRE

  • http://twitter.com/mhj_work Matt Johnson

    Would be really useful to have some form of IP address management built into VCD, so that public IP addresses can be assigned (and removed) easily, without the need to manage in a separate, external DB

  • http://twitter.com/mhj_work Matt Johnson

    VM console access should not be restricted to IE or (outdated versions of) Firefox, but should be truly cross-browser compatible

  • http://twitter.com/mhj_work Matt Johnson

    A simplified version of Chargeback (which is, without doubt, one of the least user-friendly products I’ve ever used in my life), that could be closely integrated within the VCD interface to provide some simple metrics to customers as to current usage / billing data

  • Charlie Llewellyn

    A real problem for us is how we provide a highly available vCloud layer to provide access to vSphere resources across geographically disparate datacenters. i.e. it would be great for vCloud to support a truly active/active cluster across large distances (much more cloudy :-)

    Also there seems to be a lack of integration with some of the best features of vSphere from a user point of view the most notable being snapshots and hot clones.

  • Ronen G

    Ability to customize the vCD UI,
    better console performance,

  • Jason Burrell

    Like many have said the lack of feature parity between what I can do in vCenter and what can be done in vCloud is frustrating. Some of it can be accomplished by the API but most of my customers would like the ability to use key features available in vCenter through the vCloud interface. Snapshots, hot extending disks, hot add of disks, hot add network cards are all things that are keeping people from moving more workloads into vCloud from vCenter. This also extends to vShield where functionality is lost in vCloud and I have to go into vCenter to do a task. One other pain point which has caused many of my customers pain is that external IP’s used by NAT-Routed networks are lost during a power-off/power-on event. The ability to keep an external IP though a power-off/power-on event would make it viable to use NAT-Routed for public IPs.

  • http://twitter.com/shanepainter Shane Painter

    Feature parity between vCD and vCenter is needed badly. vStorage and Storage DRS are sorely needed, as is an easy way to utilize cheaper local (direct attached) storage while being able to easily/automatically migrate VMs during maintenance events.

  • Matt

    Couple of things we`d like to see :

    The ability to choose a data store when provisioning new VMs from vCloud would be nice.

    As others have mentioned, snapshots, hot extend/hot add disk etc (although with the relevant policies/quotas etc which is probably why it’s not there now)

    Would be nice if there were two way communication between vCD and vCentre so that vCD doesn’t flip out if you turn a VM off in vSphere, or alter a NIC there.

    The console to open to the resolution of the VM you`re looking at rather than full screen EVERY time :)

    Finally it would be really nice if you could customise the portal per org, to give customers their own branding for their sites etc.

  • http://www.chriscolotti.us/ Chris Colotti

    Thanks to everyone! I am consolidating this feedback for next week. I could comment on these individually, but I will wait until folks have a chance to review your comments. It goes without saying some of these may or may not already be in the works, I just cannot comment on which ones. Stay tuned and THANKS!!

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