VMware has been the leading virtualisation platform for decades, starting with vSphere and increasing its portfolio with vSAN, NSX, the Aria Suite and many more.
When I started my IT career, it was common sense back then to implement the private infrastructure with VMware, if you wanted features like flexibility or high availability and reduce CapEx.
With time I extended knowledge over nearly the whole portfolio including VMware Horizon, automating deployment and operational processes and integrating different VMware products with 3rd party integrations for customers.
Although the VMware products themself were manageable and had their business value, the integrations felt somehow incomplete and differed from manageability level.
With VCF / SDDC Manager at least the core components started to integrate more, although from administrative perspective the benefits were only given if you had a lot from the VMware portfolio in use.
With the acquisition and streamlining the portfolio mostly against VCF, the adoption and acceptance rate is getting higher. Of course, from technical perspective, it won’t be a single click deployment and from my point of view it cannot be, as a lot of infrastructures differ and use different hardware and software bill of materials – which is good. Not every product satisfies all business values and with ongoing hardware and software improvements there is always room for different architectures and configuration demands.
The latest version VCF 9.x is a move in the right direction and like every software, it hopefully will get better with each version to satisfy and adopt business needs.