Why VMware vCloud Director Won’t Rule the Cloud

 A highly opinionated "Thought Piece" from the Front Lines of Virtualization

Disclaimer: I work for Dell Services and am the chief architect for the Dell vCloud, a public cloud offering for customers of PerotSystems (which was recently acquired by Dell). I co-architected it with two others while reporting to CTO David Crofford some time ago. After the acquisition, we retrofitted VMware vCloud on top of our ESX-based platform. In this blog, I present my personal opinion and my opinion is not affiliated with Dell's official position.

Ah, 2011. This is the year of Spotify. Steve Jobs stepped down from Apple. Everyone and their CIO are talking about “cloud” like it was some new deity descending from the heavens to solve all infrastructure sins. In boardrooms, in cafés, in airless conference rooms at VMworld, one name kept coming up. VMware vCloud Director. The chosen one. The future of private clouds. The piece de resistance of VMware’s virtualized vision. And yet, here I am, freshly caffeinated and sitting across racks of humming servers, writing this not-so-little note of caution: vCloud Director isn’t going to win the next five years. In fact, I’ll wager it’s going to stumble. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because it’s a complicated one trying to solve a problem with abstraction duct-taped on top of other abstractions, slowly floating further away from the metal.

Let me explain why this shiny new toy might just be too clever for its own good.

The Dream of the Private Cloud

Let’s be clear. I don’t hate VMware. Far from it. I’ve spent enough late nights configuring ESXi hosts and writing PowerCLI scripts to consider it a close friend. And when vSphere 4.1 was released last year, I admired what VMware had built: rock-solid hypervisor performance, DRS, HA, vMotion. It was all genuinely groundbreaking. So when vCloud Director 1.0 launched in August 2010 and promised to bring Amazon-style self-service clouds to the private data center, the tech community leaned in. “Pool your compute, abstract your networks, offer VMs on demand!” It all sounded great. Who wouldn’t want their own mini-AWS? In theory, vCloud Director (vCD) is the magical orchestration layer that takes your vSphere resources and turns them into virtual data centers (vDCs). Think multi-tenancy, self-service portals, catalog-driven deployments, network fencing, and organization-based roles. vCD even brought the ability to define vApps. These are logical groups of virtual machines that share networking and lifecycle policies. In the demo room, it was stunning. In the real world? It felt like juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle on top of a SAN array.

The Complexity Tax

The first red flag hit when I tried to explain vCloud Director to my operations team.

“Okay, so first we need a Provider vDC, then an Organization vDC, and then we create an Org with a vApp that contains VMs, which inherit resources via resource pools and get fenced networks through vShield Edge devices. Oh, and we’ll manage it all via a Flash-based web portal.”

“Wait, what?”

Exactly.

VMware took an already sophisticated virtualization environment (vSphere) and bolted on a cloud management platform that required deep familiarity with vSphere internals. And then demanded an even deeper understanding of new constructs like vDCs, Org Networks, catalog publishing, and vApp templates. Imagine learning to drive a car, and just when you’ve mastered shifting gears, someone hands you a cockpit manual for flying a 747. Except this 747 has to integrate with Active Directory, vCenter, vShield Manager, and a CMDB.

The operational complexity was not linear. It was exponential.

To make matters worse, most of us weren’t even done cleaning up the technical debt from legacy VMware installations. We got zombie VMs, tangled resource pools, and convoluted DRS rules. vCD didn’t simplify that. It assumed it was solved. And don’t even get me started on the Flash UI. Why VMware thought it was a good idea to tie their enterprise orchestration layer to a browser plug-in is beyond me. If Adobe had a dollar for every admin who cursed Flash-based vCD on IE8, they’d have launched their own cloud.

The Physics Problem

Here’s a dirty little secret about virtualization. It still runs on real servers.

Sure, vCloud Director tried to whisk us away to a dreamland of elastic resources, abstracted network containers, and beautiful service catalogs. But under the hood, we were still bound by physical host limitations, vCenter design quirks, and storage topology constraints. The moment you had to troubleshoot why a vApp template wouldn’t deploy or why a fenced network wouldn’t route traffic, you ended up descending the stack back into vSphere, tracing logs through vCenter, peeking into vShield, and occasionally SSHing into ESXi hosts.

vCD wasn’t “cloud” in the AWS sense. It was a tightly-coupled web of interdependent VMware components stitched together by wishful thinking and XML configuration files.

Let’s be real. This wasn’t software-defined infrastructure. This was software-obfuscated infrastructure.

Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?

Another critical problem with vCloud Director? It wasn’t designed for the average enterprise. It was designed for service providers. The marketing spin in 2010-2011 clearly leaned toward “build your own public cloud” rather than “simplify your internal IT.” VMware envisioned telcos and MSPs offering virtual data centers to customers, metered and billed like utilities. But most enterprise IT shops didn’t want to be Amazon. They just wanted faster provisioning, easier management, and maybe a self-service portal that wouldn’t give their DBAs nightmares. vCloud Director made sense for providers like Terremark or Savvis. But for mid-sized enterprises with four vCenter instances and a lean ops team? It was like bringing a cruise missile to a paintball fight. The overhead of managing vCD, training staff, keeping up with patching vShield, upgrading Flash, integrating LDAP, and massaging resource allocations across multiple layers. It simply wasn’t worth it for the promise of tenant isolation and templated vApp deployments.

The Domino Effect of Failure

Let’s talk about what happens when things go wrong.

And with vCloud Director, they often did. Here’s what a typical escalation chain looked like when a vApp failed to deploy:

1. User submits vApp from catalog.

2. Task fails with opaque error in UI.

3. Admin checks Org vDC quota.

4. Quota’s fine. Looks at resource pool in vCenter.

5. Finds issue with network fencing on the vApp network.

6. Digs into vShield Manager. Can’t find error.

7. Logs into ESXi host. Traces log to underlying datastore.

8. Calls VMware support.

Every layer was another dependency, another potential point of failure. Meanwhile, SLAs were ticking away and your “cloud” was acting like a confused puppet with tangled strings. It didn’t help that every upgrade path came with caveats. Want to go from vCD 1.0 to 1.5? Better have your backups ready, read all 58 pages of release notes, and pray the vShield Manager version is compatible.

The idea of “cloud agility” slowly drowned in a sea of configuration drift and maintenance windows.

The Future Isn’t This

If I look five years ahead, from my humble December 2011 vantage point. I’ll say this:

The future of cloud will not be built on layered abstractions that obscure physical realities and multiply failure domains. It will be built on simplicity, API-native constructs, and decoupled architectures.

AWS gets this. Even OpenStack, for all its drama, is trying to design for API-first infrastructure. VMware, bless them, is still building layers on layers, assuming complexity is acceptable as long as you slap a management portal on top. vCloud Director is too big, too brittle, too divorced from physical simplicity to be the core of enterprise cloud in five years. The idea of defining virtual networks inside virtual datacenters across provider-backed resource pools is clever, but it’s not practical at scale unless you’re a hosting provider. And unless VMware radically rethinks the underlying constructs, moves away from dependency on vCenter, decouples networking via Nicira (which, to be fair, might evolve into something interesting), and embraces lightweight, declarative provisioning, it’s going to struggle.

What I’d Bet On Instead

So where should we place our bets?

1. APIs over Portals

   CLI and API-based automation (think Terraform, Puppet, or Boto) will win over Flash-based GUIs every day of the week.

2. Simplicity over Abstraction

   Docker is catching fire. If containers mature and survive their teenage years, they could offer a more developer-friendly model than bloated vApps.

3. Decoupled Networking and Storage

   SDN (à la Nicira) and distributed storage (like Ceph) will outpace any vApp fencing magic once people realize they can build these primitives into infrastructure directly.

4. Stateless Orchestration

   vCD relies on a shared-state model that’s hard to scale. The future lies in stateless, event-driven orchestration.

5. Hybrid Cloud Done Right

   Enterprises want to burst to the cloud, not rebuild their entire data center in vSphere’s image. That means seamless bridging between on-prem and public cloud, not vCD silos.

Complexity is the Enemy of Resilience

In 2011, vCloud Director feels like VMware’s valiant attempt to wear Amazon’s cape using vSphere’s skeleton. But the more they abstract, the more fragile the system becomes. And the further we move from understanding the physical reality, where bits are stored, how networks are routed, why CPU shares matter, the harder it becomes to troubleshoot, to optimize, to trust.

I’m not saying vCD won’t find niche success in some service providers. But as a mainstream enterprise cloud platform? I don’t buy it. The added complexity will weigh it down. Ops teams will revolt. CIOs will shift priorities. And VMware, one day, will quietly pivot to something leaner.

As for me? I’ll be the guy sipping chai, muttering “I told you so” every time a vApp deployment crashes and burns.