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Cisco Intersight vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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
6.2
Cisco Intersight offers cost savings, simplifies operations, reduces personnel needs, and enhances management, proving valuable in tech evolution.
Sentiment score
5.8
Organizations using VMware Cloud Director experience mixed ROI, with benefits in efficiency and cost management but variable expenses.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
I have seen a return on investment, as we need fewer employees, and most of it can be done from one dashboard.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight's customer service is praised for professionalism and efficiency, though complex issues may face varying quality and escalations.
Sentiment score
6.8
VMware Cloud Director's support is helpful yet occasionally slow, with effective documentation aiding independent troubleshooting, but response time varies.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
I would rate the technical support by Cisco as an eight or nine, because Cisco TAC is one of the best TACs I work with.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Regarding the technical support team of VMware for vCloud Director, I would rate them as good and I would give them a nine out of ten.
Consultant at Lenovo India
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight is praised for scalability, adaptability, and efficiency in multi-environment management with easy deployment and server profile management.
Sentiment score
7.3
VMware Cloud Director offers impressive scalability for cloud providers, suitable for medium to large enterprises, but needs private cloud enhancements.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Scalability allows for creating server profiles quickly, mapping them to multiple servers, and removing them when scaling down.
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Cisco Intersight scales straightforwardly with the growing needs of the organization.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight is reliable, though upgrades and new features may challenge stability, with some preferring older versions.
Sentiment score
7.6
VMware Cloud Director is stable and reliable, with minor upgrade concerns, improving over time to gain user confidence.
After five years, if I don't have access to the Cisco Intersight portal, how do I manage my servers if I want to conduct some test environments?
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved integration, ease of use, more features, better support, and cost-effective maintenance for enhanced user satisfaction.
VMware Cloud Director faces criticism for integration issues, outdated features, high pricing, and installation complexity, deterring hybrid cloud use.
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.
System Presale at Bezeq
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.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
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.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
At Layer 7, the load balancing does not have many features compared to other technologies such as NetScaler from Citrix or F5.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Intersight's competitive pricing includes varied licenses, discounts, and self-setup options, with advanced features requiring higher-tier licenses.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but considered valuable for its features and flexibility, with varying licensing models and discounts.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
The pricing is solid for what we get.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
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.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight enhances data center efficiency with remote management, automation, and integration across multiple platforms and environments.
VMware Cloud Director offers efficient multitenancy, user autonomy, flexibility, scalability, and robust security features in a user-friendly interface.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
Sr. Network Engineer at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
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.
System Presale at Bezeq
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
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.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I believe the best feature of VMware Cloud Director is the multitenant capability because I use only one deployment and can configure many clients.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in Cloud Management
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.4%
Cisco Intersight1.6%
Other96.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Centralized policies have simplified hybrid operations and now support automated workflows
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed. I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
The first use case is to build a hybrid cloud. The first thing is to configure the server. The server could be located either on an edge location or on the data center, or it could be a remote offi...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I work as a partner. For optimizing, Cisco has various tools. If you talk from a network point of view, they have recently launched Nexus One. That gives enterprise an opportunity to configure a he...
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: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.