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Cisco UCS Director 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
21st
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
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 January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 3.8%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director3.8%
Cisco UCS Director1.8%
Other94.4%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OR
Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless
We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Better visibility and better control are the main benefits people receive from Cisco UCS Director; the automation and the orchestration part, these three to four points are the key factors to decide on Cisco UCS Director."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."
"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."
"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."
"It has helped us with user segmentation and QA."
"The most valuable features are the multi-tenancy and multi-site configuration."
"We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It has helped us develop a better way of selling services to customers, evolve from the typical housing, and make revenues for the Telefonica company."
"vCloud Director is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated."
"There didn't seem to be any type of integrated path on how to do the initial setup. There seemed to be different bits of paperwork or instructions available from various places. We always had to go looking for what to do next."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"If I just need to look for something quickly, it's quite difficult to find it with the way it's set up now. They should make the search button better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this solution is significant."
"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?
Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...
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

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.