Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.8, while VMware is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.2% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 6.6% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and Cisco UCS Director compete in the cloud services management category. VMware Cloud Director seems to have the upper hand due to its robust virtualization capabilities and extensive features that support both public and hybrid cloud environments.

Features: VMware Cloud Director offers a robust cloud services platform with extensive virtualization, scalability, and integration capabilities with public and hybrid clouds. Key features include vCenter Operations for monitoring and vSphere integration for seamless operations. Cisco UCS Director is integrated into Cisco solutions, providing centralized management for those environments, particularly beneficial in Cisco-heavy infrastructures.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could enhance user interface, platform maturity, and integration with public clouds. Users also raise concerns regarding pricing and version compatibility. Cisco UCS Director would benefit from improved third-party integration, more intuitive UI, and enhanced automation capabilities to expand its utility beyond Cisco-centric environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director supports various deployment models including public, private, and hybrid clouds, with generally strong customer service, though some report slow technical support responses. Cisco UCS Director emphasizes on-premises deployments, receiving positive feedback for its customer service but sometimes faces support challenges in complex settings.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director is viewed as costly, but justifiable given its extensive features and scalability, potentially offering a strong ROI through efficient resource management. Cisco UCS Director is also considered expensive, with high costs for software and support, offering less ROI due to limited built-in automation and significant development efforts required.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

April 2025

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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

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.6%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Alex Darby

Director, Infrastructure, Wintel Engineering at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Saves time during workload migration, facilitates sizing of virtual servers, and the support team is helpful

The right-sizing feature is the most captivating one for us. It helped in taking the emotions out of what people think they need, basing it off of real data, and providing them what they actually need. It's not really a special feature, but the support that we received from that team really helped us in our success. There were definitely some customizations that needed to take place to make it successful. This is the most aware of our products, in terms of understanding all of the components from the top down. It is integrated with all of the different modules, all the way down to the core infrastructure. All of it is tied together and there are not many tools that can do that.

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ErnieRumfield

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…

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure

The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"

"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"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."

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

"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."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"This solution has helped us make money and provision our clients faster."

"The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."

"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."

"The tool has a self-provisioning feature, which helps us manage projects easily. The solution is easy to use, secure, and reliable."

"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."

"Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process)."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."

"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."

"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."

"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."

"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."

"What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. It also needs a more simplified installation because the process is a little bit complicated."

"The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated."

"vCloud Director should include better billing options for businesses like mine or more options for customers to see their usage and billing situation regarding the usage of vCloud Director."

"The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive."

"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."

"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"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."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."

"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."

"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."

"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

34%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

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What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

See all answers

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 techn...

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What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind.

See all answers

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 sin...

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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...

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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 e...

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Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 17% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 64% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 36% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 25% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 20% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

May 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

May 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

March 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

vCloud Director

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Cisco

Demo not available

VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

VMware

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

April 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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