While designing our vCloud Director environment we discovered several limitations you need to take into consideration. These limitations could have an impact on your overall design.
- No support for multi-site vCloud Director deployments. For organizations that have a multiple campus locations, you can't use a single vCloud Director instance to manage your entire hosting platform.
- Moving a vApp with vCloud Connector is slow and requires and outage. We tested a single medium sized virtual machine move on our internal network and it took 45 minutes!
- There is an 8 node cluster limitation while using Fast Provisioning with VMFS. It is the same limitation as VMware View. That limitation doesn't apply if you are using NFS. With NFS you can continue with the vSphere 5.0 limit of 32 hosts in a single cluster.
- Fast Provisioning doesn't give you the same management capabilities that are found in VMware View. There is no centralized deployment method for application updates to linked clones. It makes sense, when you recompose with VMware View you lose all the saved data on the linked image. That would be bad in a server environment!
- There is a 30 clone limitation when using Fast Provisioning, and as you get close to that limitation you can suffer latency issues.
- There is no ability for different data stores and storage tiers for VMs that have diverse storage requirements in a vApp. That can become a limitation if you are trying to create a vApp for a marketing application that has a database VM that requires tier 1 storage and a web application that needs tier 3 storage. In this instance you would have to split your application up between multiple vApps based on the appropriate service class.
- vCloud Director is not storage clustering or storage DRS aware.
