We’ve had numerous conversations with VMware users exploring alternatives to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Across these discussions, common questions keep coming up:
- How easy is VM conversion from VMware to Private Cloud Director?
- Is there a vMotion and DRS equivalent?
- How is existing storage handled?
- What about Disaster Recovery and High Availability?
- Can I automate provisioning and integrate with existing tools like ServiceNow?
- How does monitoring and reporting work?
In this blog, we’ve compiled a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from VMware users evaluating Platform9 Private Cloud Director—along with clear, concise answers to help guide your decision-making.
VM Conversion
Can you convert a Virtual Machine (VM) that crosses multiple datastores or comes from a vVoL?
Yes. The conversion process is designed to handle diverse storage scenarios, so you can convert VMs even when their disks come from different data stores or multiple disks are attached to the virtual machine. See Migrate VMs from VMware to PCD in the docs for the end-to-end procedure.
How does the migration process handle VMware tools and drivers?
Platform9’s free automated conversion tool, vJailbreak, removes VMware Tools and installs the necessary drivers, including Ovirt drivers and KVM tools, as part of the conversion. In addition, the procedure can be scheduled by an admin, allows mapping of networks and disks, and can convert VMs that are powered on or powered off.
VMware vMotion and DRS Equivalents
Does the platform offer an equivalent of vMotion?
Yes. Private Cloud Director supports VM Live Migration, which moves running VMs between hypervisors within the same environment, including transferring the hypervisor state. In addition, live migration also works with block storage, providing functionality equivalent to VMware’s Storage vMotion. See Virtual Machine Migration and Storage Live Migration in the docs for prerequisites and configuration.
Does the platform offer an equivalent of DRS?
Yes. Private Cloud Director includes Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR), which serves a similar role to VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler. Specifically, DRR continuously monitors CPU and memory utilization across hypervisor hosts in a virtualized cluster and uses live migration to redistribute VMs when imbalances appear. By default, DRR evaluates the cluster every 20 minutes (configurable to 10 or 30 minutes), and a host is considered overloaded when CPU or memory utilization exceeds 80%. In addition, administrators can assign per-VM migration priority (high, normal, low, or never) to influence which VMs DRR moves first. DRR requires at least two hosts in the cluster and respects host aggregates as well as affinity and anti-affinity rules. See Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR) in the docs for prerequisites, configuration, and behavior details.
Storage
What is the purpose of the Storage role? Is it a physical host?
The Storage role is a logical function rather than a dedicated physical host. Specifically, it acts as a management gateway for communicating with persistent storage backends (Pure Storage, NetApp, HPE, Dell EMC, and others). Compute hosts running VMs still access the storage devices directly. As a result, the Storage role simply handles management tasks, such as provisioning and tearing down volumes through API calls. See Storage Overview in the docs.
Is the Storage role similar to a VASA Provider?
Yes. It serves a function similar to that of a VASA provider in VMware environments. See Block Storage in the docs for architecture details.
What happens if the host assigned the Storage role goes down?
VMs with mounted storage will continue running without interruption. However, storage management operations such as provisioning new volumes or taking snapshots will be temporarily unavailable. To avoid this risk, the Storage role can be configured for High Availability by assigning it to multiple hosts (for example, two hosts managing the same storage array). See Block Storage High Availability in the docs.
How does high availability work for the Storage role?
HA operates in an active-passive mode. Specifically, if the primary host becomes unavailable, a background service automatically redirects management API requests to the designated secondary host. As a result, storage operations continue without disruption. See Block Storage High Availability in the docs.
Are dedicated hosts required for the Storage role?
No. Dedicated hosts are not required because the Storage role is a lightweight management function with minimal resource needs. In most cases, the same hosts also serve as hypervisors running workloads. See Block Storage Pre-requisites in the docs for resource guidance.
Can storage retyping (storage migration) be performed on a running VM, or does it require downtime?
Yes. Live storage retyping is supported, which means you can migrate a VM’s storage without downtime, as long as the underlying storage array driver supports it. In addition, this includes migrations between volumes on the same array or across different arrays. See Storage Live Migration in the docs.
Disaster Recovery and VM High Availability
Significant effort has gone into integrating with various backup and DR vendors. Fully certified backup platforms include:
- Commvault
- Storware
- Trilio
- Veeam
- Rubrik
For Disaster Recovery, both Commvault and Storware provide SRM-style functionality. As a result, this approach allows active data replication to meet specific RPO and RTO requirements for disaster recovery sites. See the per-vendor Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik integration guides in the docs.
Can you provide more details on VM high availability?
Yes. See the VM HA documentation for prerequisites, configuration, and the end-to-end flow.
Is the HA feature dependent on the number of hosts in a cluster?
No. Two-node HA is supported. See VM HA in the docs for prerequisites and configuration.
Automation and Orchestration
Can customers fully automate the VM request and provisioning process using the platform?
Yes. Some customers use Private Cloud Director native self-service capabilities, have built custom front-ends, or integrated it with existing systems like ServiceNow using the REST API. For example, workflows can be set up where a blueprint provision triggers an approval process in ServiceNow before being fulfilled by the platform. See Integrate with Enterprise ITSM Workflows in the docs.
Is there a direct equivalent product to vRA (vRealize Automation) and vRO (vRealize Orchestrator)?
While there is no one-to-one product replacement, Private Cloud Director’s REST API is compatible with REST-capable third party products such as ServiceNow and works with natively with Terraform’s OpenStack provider and Ansible’s openstack.cloud to achieve similar outcomes for self-service VM lifecycle management, including provisioning, operations, and teardown. In particular, Terraform is the standard approach for declarative infrastructure provisioning across Private Cloud Director. See the Automating Private Cloud Director series for examples.
Monitoring and Reporting
What is the basis for the platform’s monitoring capabilities?
Monitoring is built on VictoriaMetrics and Grafana. Specifically, exporters on each hypervisor host (node-exporter and libvirt-exporter) collect host-level and VM-level metrics. In addition, these metrics power internal features like Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR). See the Monitoring and Observability technical bulletin for the full architecture and the Monitoring documentation for configuration.
Can monitoring and alerting be customized?
Yes. PCD exposes metrics through VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus-compatible endpoints, which can be scraped by your existing observability stack. In addition, Grafana is included for dashboards. See the Monitoring and Observability technical bulletin for integration options and the Monitoring documentation in the docs.
Are there built-in dashboards and reporting?
Yes. Grafana is accessible directly from the PCD UI, with built-in dashboards and reporting for compute, storage, and networking metrics. See the Monitoring documentation for what’s available.
Is monitoring and alerting available for individual VMs?
Yes. VM-level metrics are available through libvirt-exporter on each hypervisor host. See the Monitoring and Observability technical bulletin for available metrics and integration patterns, along with the Monitoring documentation in the docs.
Networking and Security
Is the cluster bond interface configured manually within the Operating System (OS)?
Today, network bonds must be manually configured at the OS level. See Pre-requisites in the docs for host preparation guidance.
In addition to the network interface configuration, what else needs to be set up on the servers ahead of platform installation?
Typically, you’ll need to prepare the OS (for example, Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04) for the hypervisor, configure network interfaces (including bonds if required), and ensure the disk layout meets the platform’s requirements for storing configuration files. In addition, any specialized interfaces, such as Fibre Channel or custom network connections, must also be configured. See Pre-requisites in the docs.
Can the platform operate behind a firewall or in an air-gapped environment?
Yes, if you have a firewall, the platform can work through your proxy. For on-premises installations without internet access, necessary packages can be cached locally. See Air Gapped Installation in the docs.
What identity providers are supported for SSO into the platform?
The platform supports any SAML 2.0 provider, such as Google Workspace, Okta, or Microsoft Entra ID, for Single Sign-On (SSO). Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is also supported. See Identity & Multi-Tenancy in the docs for configuration details.
How are identity groups mapped within the platform?
Identity groups live in a domain and are mapped to tenants via role assignments, with resource quotas applied at the tenant level. See Identity & Multi-Tenancy in the docs.
Virtual Machine Management and Tenancy
Is it possible to search for VMs by name across all tenants, or do you need to know the specific tenant?
Yes. You can search for virtual machines by name across all tenants. However, in very large-scale environments, this feature might be disabled by default for performance reasons, although it can be enabled as needed. See Tenants & Region in the docs.
Is the ability to limit resources set at the user level or strictly at the tenant level?
Resource limits can be set at the user level, but they are primarily managed at the tenant level. Specifically, users are granted access to tenants, and resource allocations are controlled within each tenant’s overall resource pool. See Tenant Quotas, User Quotas and VM Leases in the docs.
Can different users within the same tenant have different resource limits assigned to them?
Yes. You can assign compute resource limits (CPU and memory) to individual users within the same tenant. However, user-specific networking quotas are not supported. See Tenant Quotas, User Quotas and VM Leases in the docs.
Platform Architecture and Components
Which components of the platform are based on open source?
The platform incorporates several core open-source components from the OpenInfra community (now part of the Linux Foundation) and other open-source projects:
- Compute, storage, image library, and networking APIs for compatibility and broad integration support.
- Monitoring is built on VictoriaMetrics and Grafana. See the Monitoring and Observability technical bulletin for the architecture.
Over time, many components have been significantly modified or replaced to enhance functionality. For example, Private Cloud Director’s VM High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Rebalancing are Platform9 innovations.
Ultimately, the goal is to leverage the strengths of open source, such as tenancy models, while delivering a user experience that feels familiar to VMware users. See Architecture and Technical Overview in the docs.
Is the platform a fork of open source? Does Platform9 contribute back?
Yes. The platform is effectively a fork. As a result, Platform9 has control over the platform’s direction and the ability to re-architect components where upstream projects were insufficient (such as monitoring and high availability).
In addition, Platform9 contributes back to open source where feasible, typically when there is no major difference in design approach. Some features, like cross-tenant search, have been developed entirely in-house. Notably, the platform remains API-compatible with the upstream services it builds upon. See Architecture and Technical Overview in the docs.
How are platform upgrades handled? Is there downtime?
Upgrades cover both the host agents and the central management control plane:
- Management plane upgrades require scheduled downtime, during which the UI and API services are temporarily unavailable.
- Host upgrades are performed sequentially, typically taking about ten minutes per host. As a result, these upgrades do not disrupt running virtual machines or workloads.
For customers using Private Cloud Director’s SaaS management plane, upgrades are performed in coordination with support.
Upgrades cover both the host agents and the central management control plane:
- Management plane upgrades require scheduled downtime, during which the UI and API services are temporarily unavailable.
- Host upgrades are performed sequentially, typically taking about ten minutes per host. These upgrades do not disrupt running virtual machines or workloads.
Can containers be deployed on Private Cloud Director? Does it use Kubernetes?
Yes. Private Cloud Director supports deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters as VMs consuming virtual clusters of hypervisor hosts. As a result, you get a single pane of glass for managing both virtual machines and Kubernetes workloads. See Kubernetes Clusters Overview in the docs.
Operating System and Drivers
Who manages OS updates and drivers on the hypervisor hosts?
Customers are responsible for managing the underlying Linux OS and any specific drivers required for their hardware. See the Pre-requisites and the Host Operating System Support Matrix in the docs for current supported versions.
Are custom OS images required or provided?
Customers set up their own servers using supported OS versions. See the pre-requisites in the docs for supported versions.
Is there support for newer OS versions like Ubuntu 24.04?
Yes, Ubuntu 24.04 is supported. See the pre-requisites in the docs for current supported versions.
Is there an equivalent to VMware’s Lifecycle Manager for deploying drivers across a cluster?
Not yet, although it is on the mid-term roadmap. See the Pre-requisites in the docs for current driver guidance.
Can drivers be updated individually, or does it require a full OS update/re-image?
Drivers can be manually updated on each host individually, without needing a full re-image. See the Pre-requisites in the docs for supported configurations.
Are there specific requirements for cloud-init templates used with the platform?
No, there are no proprietary requirements. Private Cloud Director supports standard cloud-init functionality and syntax. In addition, IP addresses can be set manually within the cloud-init template, within the VM for Layer 2 Networks, or assigned dynamically via DHCP on Managed Networks.
Content Libraries
Do content libraries support replicating templates from a single source to multiple locations?
Currently, each region in Private Cloud Director uses it’s own Image Library.
