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Cisco Intersight vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Intersight reduces costs and time via hyper-converged tech, simplifying management and improving user satisfaction over time.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Cloud Director improves client provisioning, resource control, and efficiency, but opinions vary on its long-term cost-effectiveness.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Cisco Intersight's support is available 24/7, praised for competence but can be slow for complex issues. Ratings vary.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's support is praised for effectiveness but criticized for delays, improving complex case handling, and communication.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Cisco technical support is helpful.
Cisco provides better support than anyone else.
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Intersight is highly scalable, effortlessly managing multi-environments and automating tasks, with high user satisfaction across various settings.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director excels in scalability, enabling efficient workload management and integration, highly rated for large-scale deployments.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Cisco Intersight is scalable enough for our needs, allowing management in a multi-environment setup and working remotely while deploying servers.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Cisco Intersight is generally stable and secure, but upgrades and documentation gaps may pose challenges, affecting stability ratings.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is highly rated for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and interoperability challenges during deployment.
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved hybrid cloud integration, enhanced automation, AI assistance, easier migration, setup, and broader device management.
VMware Cloud Director needs improved integration, GUI, search, interoperability, cost options, automation, and features found in competitors.
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa.
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
 

Setup Cost

Opinions on Cisco Intersight pricing vary, though most agree it offers fair value and justifiable investment for enterprises.
VMware Cloud Director is pricey but offers extensive features, with flexibility options for cost-conscious buyers against major cloud competitors.
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
The pricing mechanism sounds fair.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight provides integration, orchestration, analytics, and automation for enhanced manageability, scalability, and security in data centers.
VMware Cloud Director offers scalable, user-friendly cloud management with strong integration, automation, and multi-tenancy for private and hybrid environments.
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in Cloud Management
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 2.5%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.0%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

ItzikLiberman - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides data center management and full infrastructure visibility
Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management. It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure. We have visibility to other products and storages, some networking. It is also valuable for its integration capabilities with other products.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
31%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?
Intersight can validate our environment.
What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We use Cisco Intersight ( /products/cisco-intersight-reviews ) for operational tasks. We run patches and import firmware updates from the Cisco site. In the event of a component failure, such as a ...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

Intersight
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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