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Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) 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
7.5
Nutanix Cloud Clusters users experience 15%-50% cost savings through reduced administration, hardware needs, and increased efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director improves client provisioning, resource control, and efficiency, but opinions vary on its long-term cost-effectiveness.
In time, it has proven beneficial because we no longer have to have hands-on management of a server environment; really, one engineer does it.
In comparison, five years ago, we purchased 30 nodes on-prem, and now we are only using six nodes in Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2).
I would say our total cost of ownership has been reduced by approximately 30% to 50%.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Nutanix support is praised for expertise and proactivity, though some suggest improvement in response speed for complex issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's support is praised for effectiveness but criticized for delays, improving complex case handling, and communication.
The people I get are intelligent and know how to fix the issue the first time I call them, so it's been great.
The customer service and technical support have been very helpful; they jump on calls with us and stay engaged until any issues are resolved.
They're good and help us whenever we need them.
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Cloud Clusters offers robust scalability, allowing efficient resource expansion for diverse company sizes and cloud deployments.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director excels in scalability, enabling efficient workload management and integration, highly rated for large-scale deployments.
During builds, it was very scalable, and adding or removing nodes was far quicker than if we were to do that on-prem in our own data center.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) scales very effectively with the growing needs of my company, and it does so very fast and quickly.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) scales amazingly with the growing needs of our company.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) offers reliable performance with 99.99% uptime, swiftly addressing issues and ensuring user confidence.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is highly rated for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and interoperability challenges during deployment.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is very reliable with 99.99% uptime.
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) are commendable.
I have found Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) to be stable and reliable.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Clusters need better pricing, intuitive interface, scalability, seamless integration, and enhanced security and support services.
VMware Cloud Director needs improved integration, GUI, search, interoperability, cost options, automation, and features found in competitors.
The one thing that stands out is the costing, especially if you check the NCM module, where you see the cost of the VM, which is defined by the customer rather than how the calculations work if that VM is a reserved instance.
My suggestion would be getting up to speed on ransomware and evolving, as attackers are always one step ahead of what's out there.
Some features that people say Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) lacks could be simplified to make it easier, such as a single pane of glass, and getting more into Google Cloud would be very helpful for our team as we're working on GCP interfaces.
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

Enterprise buyers highlight Nutanix's high pricing, but appreciate license portability and support, mitigating cost concerns through strategic alliances.
VMware Cloud Director is pricey but offers extensive features, with flexibility options for cost-conscious buyers against major cloud competitors.
Our partners at Nutanix did work with us recently and reduced a huge licensing cost for us.
For us, the pricing and costs have been fair.
When working with my sales representatives, everything is included, they've been very helpful, and it's been within our price range for the most part.
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

Nutanix Cloud Clusters enhance scalability, cost-efficiency, and productivity with seamless management, automation, and robust hybrid environment capabilities.
VMware Cloud Director offers scalable, user-friendly cloud management with strong integration, automation, and multi-tenancy for private and hybrid environments.
We're not limited based on the hardware that we have. We allow ourselves room for growth, and we can literally grow from today to tomorrow to ensure that we're handling our growth.
We used to have a light-for-light kind of build-out in another data center in a different location. Now, we can pare that down to just a couple of nodes and know that we can burst it out when we need to.
Nutanix's license portability is a very valuable tool for us because we were building our own data center, so we've bought on-prem licenses and then utilize that for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2).
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.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd)
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 Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is 0.8%, up from 0.4% 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

Panomporn_Meesangeam - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrated with the personal files and knowledge management processes but is expensive
The customer is a company in Thailand. They use Nutanix Cloud Clusters for file sharing and integrate with personal file share and knowledge management. Our customer attaches a file service with a login and connects with WiFi for cloud content, such as second documents or email access files…
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
26%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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 Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
The overall infrastructure is the most valuable part of Nutanix Cloud Clusters.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
I'm not familiar with the contracts, but I thought the process was pretty seamless. Licensing for the Nutanix part was the same as licensing something on-prem, and since it runs on bare metal EC2, ...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
We've been told some of these things are on the road map. I believe that networking is one of the biggest improvements. They have a great stock already, but some use cases, particularly around incr...
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

Nutanix Clusters
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The Home Depot, JetBlue, Hyundai, ShiftLeft
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.