Beyond the platform-wide features every app gets, GitLab on VCloud specifically means:
- No metered CI/CD minutes. Pipelines run on your own instance, so minutes are bounded by your plan's compute rather than billed separately the way GitHub Actions or GitLab.com's own CI meter them.
- Community Edition, in full. Repository hosting, merge requests, CI/CD, the container registry, and issue tracking, with no per-seat license.
- Correctly sequenced upgrades. GitLab enforces a strict, non-skippable upgrade path with real database migrations behind it - handled for you rather than left as something to get wrong.
- A backup that's actually restorable. GitLab's backup needs to span the database, repositories, uploads, and a separate secrets file - miss the secrets file and an otherwise complete backup can't be restored. VCloud's backup takes all of it together.
See Installing GitLab for the setup walkthrough.