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Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

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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

Red Hat CloudForms
Ranking in Cloud Management
37th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 November 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.5%
Red Hat CloudForms1.8%
Other95.7%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji
A stable solution that helps to provision servers
We use the solution to provision servers.  I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs.   The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved.  I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.  I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…
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

"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients. It has been working fine and seamlessly for them. Its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting, as it means we can prepare a bunch of VMs with self-service provisioning."
"The integration with other open-source tools is pretty good; it integrates particularly well with Kubernetes and Docker, and they are a very mature product."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"They are a very mature product."
"Good features of extensibility, which allows integration of other services."
"vCloud Director is a stable solution."
"It has been working flawlessly for the last ten years and we have been very happy with it."
"Simple, scalable, and comprehensive solution for large enterprises"
"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director for me is its user-friendly UI, which is much easier compared to other platforms."
"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly, and it offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."
"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."
 

Cons

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed."
"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."
"The integration between components could be improved."
"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."
"At Layer 7, the load balancing does not have many features compared to other technologies such as NetScaler from Citrix or F5."
"Choosing VMware in general, is best in terms of functionality, but it is not necessarily cost effective, as their licensing and setup cost are too high."
"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."
"Metering is one of the areas where I find Cloud Director leaves much to be desired."
"The product's UI has certain shortcomings that require improvement."
"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."
"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Transportation Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.