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I like how its tightly integrated into vsphere, vsan, and NSX. they all work together under one platform. it gives me enterprise grade reliability and automation without lots of complexity under the hood.
The product itself is fantastic. The VMware hypervisor is stable and utilizes the physical hardware of the hosts optimally. When coupled with vCenter, VCF takes full advantage of the traditional features that has made VMware the leader in the server virtualization space: vMotion, storage vMotion, vSAN, built in security features like NSX, and Aria for monitoring and provisioning. vSAN has really helped my organization save money on storage costs. In our environment, we run a small production server farm utilizing VCF that does not require fast enterprise storage. vSan enables us to run our production environment utilizing shared storage without the use of a dedicated enterprise grade SAN. The security features of NSX are also wonderful. It allows us to create very granular rules for communication between servers, thus enhancing our security posture in our virtual environment.
The process of creating the VMs and managing them is quite easy. We are using multiple VMs and have created a virtual cluster across few servers. It shines in a microservice architecture setting. It fits so well for our usecase.
Its on the expensive side for sure, especially when scaling out. while powerful, some of the patching and upgrading can be time consuming.
Cost is the primary feature that I dislike about this product. VCF is significantly more expensive than other offerings by Broadcom. Under this new licensing model, Broadcom only offers multi-year commitments for their products and VCF is the only product that they will bill annually. All other products need to be paid up-front for the entire duration of the contract. Secondly, support for this product has not been stellar. We have only had to call support a handful of times, but the technicians that we have engaged with did not seem very knowledgeable about the product and only offered what seemed like rudimentary solutions. Finally, VCF with its additional components is quite a complex product and requires a lot of investment by system administrators to learn and configure. My team has gone to training several times in the time that we have utilized this product.
This being a licensed model while other free options are available made it a less desirable choice at first. But having the peace of mind knowing that we will get support if something goes wrong was well worth it.
