VMware has just released VMware Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager version 1.4. I have blogged about the product in the past. I have been testing the version 1.4 in my lab and must say it is now significantly easier to use to deploy, manage new or brown field deployments of the VMware Cloud Director stack.
The UI has now almost full parity with the API. So it is now very easy to use the product from the UI for single environment management (at scale you would probably still want to use API). Additionally, existing VCD environments (either deployed buy VCPLCM or any other way) can be registered under management of VCPLCM. You will just need to provide a few basic information (solution endpoint address, passwords, etc.) which allows VCPLCM to run the discovery process and collect additional details (nodes, certificates, integrations, etc.). Once that is done you simply finish the registration by supplying missing details such as integration passwords or node names and their network port groups in VC inventory that could not be autodiscovered.
With VCD under management of VCPLCM the most annoying operations such as upgrades, certificate replacements or node additions/redeployments are very simple to perform and take just a few minutes.
Give it a try!
Tom Fojta's Blog 