Rackspace looks to have bypassed vCloud Director upgrade Rackspace has decided to manage its VMware cloud with software from upstart AirVM. The decision is great news for AirVM and almost certainly unwelcome for VMware, which has of late been beta testing a new version of vCloud Director, the code it offers service providers to manage and operate their VMware-based clouds. VMware …
As someone who has sat, pounding my head onto a spike for hours with vCD I can assure you that ANYTHING (including a root canal w/o anaesthetic done from my back passage) would be a welcome break. vCD in my experience is a kludgy, browser malviolent application that also boasts Java as one of its sins. Add to it vCloud Air in the mix and misadventures explode logarithmicly for the amount of inconsistency and pain one must endure.
I wish anyone entering this market well -- it desperately needs better tools.
VMware has publicly stated that vCD GUI is frozen and are well aware that it is barely functional.
Their main efforts with vCD is providing an API around the core functions of it, and all new features will be API only features.
They actively push partners to either write their own GUI around vCD APIs, or to AirVM or OnApp to provide a GUI.
VMware has no further interest in making vCD GUI work, as its biggest sin right now is a dependance on Flash & the depreciated NPAPI browser plugin framework. Since Chrome has disabled NPAPI in its current builds (but can be enabled to make vCD GUI work), but will be ripped out totally in the very near future, as well as Chrome will be making Flash a click to run feature, means vCD GUI won't be functional in Chrome at all without clicking to run, and even then you won't be able to upload/download OVAs or ISOs at all in any fashion without switching to a different browser (certainly not Edge either). I believe Firefox has NPAPI plugins disabled by default now too, although I don't know its' schedule to fully rip out NPAPI at this time, so that is out as well.
vCD is crap. Even VMWare admit that these days (although not officially i'm sure). They ignored the service provide community for years as we yelled loudly about how bad it was, refusing to admit there was any problem with it - that was until they tried to launch vCHS and finally accepted what a pile of junk it was. At that point, the took away development of vCD from the enterprise development team - who had considered service providers as an after-thought, and gave it to a dedicated development team. At this time they had a large number of discussions and focus sessions with the SP community, and basically the resounding feedback was "forget the UI as we all have our own control panels anyway, focus on the functionality first". This was about 2 years ago now, and yet they still haven't really delivered what they promised on the roadmap at that time. I'd go into more detail but i'm probably still under NDA.
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