The Curious Case of vCloud Director and the Perils of Over-Engineering

Back in December 2011, I wrote what many considered a borderline heretical blog post: a prediction that VMware vCloud Director, that shining paragon of private cloud orchestration, would not thrive in the following five years. At the time, I was accused of being overly skeptical, anti-vCloud, and even of being secretly on AWS’s payroll. (Spoiler: I wasn’t. Though I wouldn’t have minded the stock options.)

Now that it’s August 2016, I figured it’s only fair to revisit that time capsule of cynicism and ask: Was I right? Well, grab your favorite performance dashboard, because the data doesn’t lie. Let’s tally up the results.

What I Warned in 2011

Just to refresh your memory (and my ego), here’s the TL;DR of what I said five years ago:

1. vCloud Director was too complex for most enterprises.

2. It was designed more for telcos and service providers, not your average enterprise IT shop.

3. It introduced too many layers of abstraction, distancing users from the physical infrastructure.

4. It relied on fragile integrations between vCenter, vShield, and Flash-based UIs.

5. It tried to emulate AWS without being AWS.

6. And lastly, complexity is the enemy of resilience.

So, what happened?

Prediction #1: Enterprises Would Flee vCloud Director

Nailed It

By 2014, whispers began turning into blog posts. Enterprises who dipped their toes into the vCD waters realized they’d need dedicated engineers just to maintain the beast. Adoption among service providers? Sure. But mainstream enterprises? Not so much.

In 2013, VMware quietly pulled the plug on vCloud Director for enterprise use. The product was repositioned strictly for cloud service providers under the vCloud Air Network (vCAN) program. Meanwhile, VMware nudged enterprise customers toward vRealize Automation (vRA)—a different platform entirely for self-service provisioning and orchestration.

In other words, vCD became a B2B hosting tool, not the cornerstone of enterprise private clouds as originally promised.

Prediction #2: Flash-Based UI Would Age Like Spoiled Milk

100% Accurate

Remember the Flash portal? Yeah. So do security auditors and frustrated sysadmins.

By 2014, the writing was on the wall for Flash as an enterprise-grade UI layer. Browser compatibility broke every other week, Adobe was issuing monthly zero-day patches, and the rise of mobile/tablet UIs made Flash feel like an antique jukebox in a Spotify world. VMware, to its credit, started moving away from Flash in its newer products, but for vCloud Director, that UI remained stubbornly stuck in the early 2000s, and it showed.

Prediction #3: Complexity Would Lead to Fragility

If I Were More Right, I’d Be an Earthquake

The irony of vCloud Director was that it promised cloud-like agility while requiring a Byzantine maze of configurations to deploy a single VM. The layers of dependency, vCenter, vShield (later NSX), AMQP brokers, catalogs, fencing rules, made it a house of cards.

And once something broke? You needed a PhD in “VMware Log Archaeology” to diagnose the issue.

Some customers learned this the hard way when vShield Manager updates broke Org networks, or catalog syncing failed silently, or fencing rules caused unpredictable routing loops.

By 2015, most pragmatic CIOs had shifted their attention to platforms that emphasized stateless, API-driven deployment (hello, Terraform and Ansible) or to container-based workflows (hello, Docker and Kubernetes). vCloud Director just couldn’t keep up with the velocity of the DevOps tide.

Prediction #4: The Market Would Move Toward Simpler, API-Driven Models

Soothsayer Status Achieved

While VMware was doubling down on vCloud constructs and NSX integrations, the industry was pivoting hard to:

• AWS-native services (EC2, RDS, Lambda)

• Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform

• Containers and Kubernetes as a preferred unit of compute

• CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and GitOps workflows

Compare that to vCD’s approach: a multi-tiered catalog system for vApp templates and resource pool-bound quotas buried in Flash UIs.

You can imagine who won.

In fact, VMware itself eventually embraced Kubernetes, acquiring Heptio in 2018 and rolling out Tanzu. The world had moved on from orchestrated VMs to orchestrated containers. vCD became something of a forgotten elder, till wise in its ways, but not built for the new world.

Prediction #5: Enterprises Wanted to Consume, Not Build Cloud

Validation Everywhere

In 2011, I argued that most enterprises didn’t want to build AWS—they wanted to use something like AWS. They needed cloud-like simplicity without becoming cloud service providers themselves.

By 2016, hybrid cloud strategies had matured. Enterprises were connecting their vSphere environments to public cloud backends, not re-architecting their datacenters to act like clouds.

VMware caught on and launched vCloud Air (remember that?) as their public cloud offering… but it failed to gain real traction and was eventually sold off in parts. Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure and AWS took the lion’s share of new enterprise workloads.

The “build-your-own-AWS” strategy with vCD was like asking every car owner to become a Formula 1 engineer. Turns out, most people just want a good ride to work.

What I Got Less Right

Alright, I’m not infallible. Here are a couple of things I might have underestimated:

1. NSX Was a Game Changer

While I critiqued vShield (rightfully), NSX eventually became a solid SDN solution. When paired with vCD, some service providers built powerful multi-tenant environments. That said, it was still not simple, and not for most enterprises.

2. The Rise of Hyper-Converged and SDDC

I didn’t anticipate how fast VMware would pivot to hyper-converged infrastructure (vSAN) and full SDDC stacks, creating better building blocks for simpler private clouds. But even there, vCD was not the main driver—tools like vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundation took the wheel. 

I had my share of vRealize, Cisco UCSD, and Cisco IAC (CIAC) while leading the EMC Hybrid Cloud Portfolio (part of Vblock from Acadia, a.k.a. VCE - the VMware, Cisco, and EMC consortium).

The Verdict

vCloud Director Was a Dead-End for Most

As of 2016, here’s the state of vCloud Director:

• Still exists, but aimed squarely at cloud providers, not enterprise IT.

• Too heavy for modern DevOps and ill-suited for agile deployments.

• Deprecated in many enterprise roadmaps, replaced by vRealize Automation, OpenStack, or direct AWS usage.

• Lives on as a reminder that abstraction without simplification is a recipe for pain.

So yes, dear readers. My 2011 skepticism wasn’t anti-innovation—it was a plea for simplicity, transparency, and pragmatism in how we design cloud systems.

Don’t Build Cathedrals When You Need Food Trucks

Looking back, vCloud Director was VMware’s cathedral. Tall, intricate, beautiful in a way, and built by smart people with good intentions.

But the cloud revolution didn’t need cathedrals.

It needed food trucks—fast, nimble, focused tools that get the job done and move on. Simple menus, minimal overhead, API-first thinking. That’s what AWS brought. That’s what containers enabled. And that’s what modern IT teams crave.

So here’s to learning from history. And to all of you still managing a dusty vCD instance tucked away in a service provider corner—may your logs be parseable and your networks route cleanly.

Onward.

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I am a Cloud Realist, Vintage VM Wrangler, and Reluctant Prophet of Too Much Abstraction