Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #21 with an average rating of 6.4, while VMware is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 69% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Cloud Director based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: September 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

ERIK LABRA

Technical Specialist, consultant at NTT DATA

Jul 17, 2024

Automates cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting

Initially, it can be tricky as you have to configure everything. The setup requires a significant level of effort. If there were a way to migrate or import some features or have some preconfigured settings, it would greatly help with the initial setup. It takes three to four months as per standard operation. We have engineers who are certified in the tools. We have a couple of product managers, but the main source of disruption, or at least delays, is the integration and dependency on other areas. For example, if we want to integrate the CMDB with the monitoring tools we already have in place for each of our different customers, it requires time and dependencies not only on the availability of people but also on the ability to make changes to the environments.

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reviewer1855059

Principal, Cybersecurity Services at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2023

A compact and flexible solution with a lot of features

The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features. The product's pricing needs to improve. The tool is stable. You need to check upgrades every now and then. The solution is scalable. The tool's setup is understandable once you get an idea of the Cisco product. I would rate…

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reviewer1155024

Head of Transport & Data Networks Engineering Department at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jan 25, 2024

Efficient infrastructure management that offers comprehensive cloud management capabilities, including multi-tenancy, self-service provisioning and integration with VMware technologies

Over the past two years, VMware transitioned from vSphere 6.3 to 2016, which presented challenges for us. The migration from VTT was particularly difficult, prompting us to reconsider the solution's architecture. VMware occasionally makes decisions that impact customers and alter workflow, necessitating adjustments to features and processes. It would be beneficial if VMware maintained greater backward compatibility in their technology upgrades, ensuring smoother transitions and minimizing disruptions for users. It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security. While such options exist, they are inadequately documented, requiring experimentation with uncertain outcomes. We seek clearer documentation and smoother integration processes to minimize risks and ensure functionality when incorporating third-party solutions.

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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 primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."

"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

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

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

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

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

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

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

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

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."

"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."

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

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

"vCloud Director requires less knowledge to get into in the first place. Therefore, when we bring in new members of staff, we can always give them the customer experience straightaway, and they can pick it up quite easily."

"The solution is reliable and performs well."

"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."

"The deployment is easy."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."

"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."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

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

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

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

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

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."

"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."

"It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security."

"It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI."

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

"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."

"This is very simple in OpenShift. We are happy with vCloud in terms of the virtualization but not for redundancy and distribution."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

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

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."

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

"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"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 cost of this solution is significant."

"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."

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

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

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

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"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."

"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."

"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."

"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"This is an expensive solution."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

35%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

Government

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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?

I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

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

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 52% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 23% of the time

vCenter Orchestrator vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 13% 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 25% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

September 2024

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

August 2024

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

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vCloud Director

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IBM

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VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by companies to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions.

IBM Turbonomic leverages AI to continuously analyze application resource consumption, deliver insights and dashboards, and make real-time adjustments. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. By integrating with various cloud platforms, on-premise infrastructures, and containers, IBM Turbonomic provides a holistic view of the environment, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

The solution is designed to support complex IT environments, offering actionable insights and automated actions that help IT teams proactively manage application performance and infrastructure resources. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years.

IBM Turbonomic manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers to ensure efficiency and financial impact awareness. It automates resource allocation, balances memory dynamically, and provides robust performance metrics. Users benefit from its ability to prevent resource starvation and offer cost-saving recommendations through continuous management. Executive Dashboards provide insights for cost justification and resource management, making IT operations simpler with AI-driven automation and actionable recommendations.

What are the most important features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automated Resource Allocation: Dynamically allocates resources for optimal performance.
Dynamic Memory Balancing: Adjusts memory allocation to prevent resource shortages.
Right-Sizing: Sizes VMs accurately for Azure and on-prem environments.
Single Platform Management: Manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers.
Proactive Performance Optimization: Continuously optimizes performance to prevent issues.
Kubernetes Support: Enhances container management with robust support.
Cost-Saving Recommendations: Provides actionable tips for reducing expenses.

What benefits should users look for in IBM Turbonomic reviews?

Cost Reduction: Helps minimize expenses through efficient resource management.
Performance Improvement: Enhances application performance by preventing resource starvation.
Detailed Insights: Offers comprehensive analytics to justify costs and resource utilization.
Simplified IT Processes: Uses AI automation to streamline operations.

IBM Turbonomic is implemented across multiple industries, including finance for optimizing peak payroll processing, IT for enhanced virtual server management, and healthcare for reliable performance monitoring. Organizations benefit from its robust automation, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost savings.

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

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.

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

September 2024

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: September 2024.

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