CSMP

We use the solution to provide self-service to end users in our virtual environment.

I find the self-service features valuable. In a virtual environment, you don't get that cloud experience. When creating something close to a cloud experience, you need a cloud platform like CloudBolt. Another benefit of using CloudBolt is how it helps with resource control. It helps with resource control, such as with network storage in any infrastructure. Another valuable feature is in the application deployment and customization.

The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement. Another area that the solution needs to improve on is the UI. The UI can be much better.

I've worked on CloudBolt for about four years. I'm using the most recent version.

The solution is very stable. You will have no issues if you deploy it according to the minimum requirements and best practices recommended by CloudBolt's documentation.

Cloudbox is just an abstraction software. There is no need for scalability. It's quite a simple solution. You might only need to increase the resources you apply to the CloudBold deployment. If, for example, the number of users increases, you might have to check the recommendations from CloudBolt and act accordingly.

We have over 100 internal users. Regarding the infrastructure it sits on, the solution sits on the private of the on-prem, a VMware infrastructure that stands across two sites, the DR and the main production. We have over 60 ESXi of Asterisk and about 500 or 1,000 virtual machines.

We used CloudStack for some reason, and though it's not a directly competitive solution, we received a recommendation to switch to CloudBolt.

The deployment process is straightforward, and we have proper documentation online. After deploying the solution, we tailor it to our taste. After deployment, if we want to integrate it with virtualized on-premises infrastructure and our multi-cloud infrastructures, we create sections or different groups of users and give them access to the resources we want them to be limited to.

We took a week to deploy the solution, but the greenlight took a month or two. After deployment, we went to the test phases. Then, after the test phases, the solution went for generic users and the organization.

I just needed two people during deployment. CloudBolt requires no maintenance. Since we've deployed the solution as a virtual machine, we do regular backups and have never had any issues with it.

We have seen a return on investment after using CloudBolt. We wanted it as an alternate solution and picked it up with pressure from the admin team and the engineers. We wanted something useful for self-service, and it was a good option. The solution serves as the primary object in going for it.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive. The license is expensive to acquire.

I found that there is an alternative solution in the market called OpenNebula.

Any user considering CloudBolt should consider what they need in the long run, not just the structure. It's a good solution, but they must ensure it's what they want. We're looking at doing OpenStack after so many years with CloudBolt. Users must check if CloudBolt is what they want in the long run, but the short term might be good. For users who have a multi-cloud and want to manage the entire infrastructure from one pane of glass, CloudBolt is a go-to solution. I rate CloudBolt a seven out of ten.

We used the solution to manage a pretty substantial financial institution’s IaaS infrastructure. We were also using it to manage the infrastructure as a service of a government area. It was pretty good.

The ability to manage most clouds is helpful, especially with extremely large organizations where we have multiple cloud providers, and we cannot centralize management. It was one of the areas that really helped us, especially with managing and mapping resources. We also used CloudBolt to find a shadow IT resource. Nobody knew what they were doing or who was responsible for them.

Management and finance features are valuable.

The management of SaaS must be improved. It would be great if CloudBolt could also manage SaaS resources.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten. We haven’t had a crunch.

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. We had only a little bit of an issue with it, but it was mostly on our part.

Every time I needed technical support, the team was super easy to reach. The team gave me simple answers.

Positive

The initial deployment was super easy.

I see a return on investment in the solution.

The product costs us approximately $200 per month on AWS. The on-premises version cost us $100 per month. The solution is reasonably priced.

The platform works as it's supposed to. It’s really fast. I would recommend the solution to others. I used three other cloud management tools. Overall, I can confidently rate the product a ten out of ten.

One use case for CloudBold is creating blueprint templates for multiple clouds. Another is cost management or optimization. There is a piece that comes along with CloudBolt called Kumolus, and there is a lot of interest in that side of cost management.

Cost management is a valuable feature, but the solution's biggest advantage is flexibility. There is a standard framework that CloudBolt provides, but if I'm good with Python, I can tweak it and make it better. I can customize it easily.

The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work. Likewise, Cloudbolt takes a long time to configure and set up properly. If I install an app, I should be able to quickly get it to work without taking a long time to configure and set it up.

I've used the solution for more than two years.

I rate CloudBolt's stability a seven or eight out of ten.

I rate CloudBolt's scalability a seven or eight out of ten. The solution is deployed as a demo, so there aren't many users.

The initial setup is not difficult in the sense that you need a very highly skilled person to do it. The initial setup is a long process with many steps to do it. It's time-consuming to set up and build the solution. By contrast, deploying the solution doesn't take much time, and it's simple.

I have not completed anything big or successful with the solution, but I see its advantages. There will be an ROI depending on how people work today. If people have the tool, they also have automation built in. They get a request, then click a button and do it. For them, it's not a big ROI. But there is a lot of ROI for people who do a lot of manual stuff.

The pricing depends on where the customers are. The system is cheaper if a customer has fewer servers since you pay by the node. Let's say I'm an enterprise with 50,000 servers. I would be paying a lot every year.

I've contacted customer support many times, but I have access to their tech team since we are partners. I've not gone through their support channel. I have a direct hook to them. We have regular meetings where we talk about problems and get answers to them.

If somebody's using the solution for the first time, it's good if the system gives a demo. When you come up, the solution could go "click here, set this up, click here, set this up," and walk you through the steps until you are an expert that needs to be there. There is a setting in the configuration, and sometimes I enable it. That way, when people log in, the solution walks you through that. "First configure the cloud, and then configure this…" It'll walk you through the steps to do it. If CloudBolt has some videos or something I've not seen recently, people can watch the video to go through the steps instead of messing up.

I rate CloudBolt a five out of ten.