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 6.4, while VMware is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.1% 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: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.1%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 10, 2022

It can tell us where performance is lagging on the hardware layer, but the reporting on the application layer is lacking

The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer. I would like them to add some apps for physical device load resourcing and physical-to-virtual calculation. It gives excellent recommendations for the virtual layer but doesn't have the capabilities for physical-to-virtual analysis. Automated deployment is something else they could add. Some built-in automation features are helpful, but we aren't effectively using a few. We want a few more automated features, like autoscaling and automatic performance optimization testing would be useful.

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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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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Jun 10, 2024

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

"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."

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

"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."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"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 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."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

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

"vCloud Director is a stable solution."

"Good features of extensibility, which allows integration of other services."

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

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

"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director for me is its user-friendly UI, which is much easier compared to other platforms."

"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."

"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."

"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."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

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

"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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."

"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."

"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."

"Lacks integration with the hyperscalers."

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

"There are too many errors, it could be more stable."

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

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

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

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

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"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."

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

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"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."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."

"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."

"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 solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."

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

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

36%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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...

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

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Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

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Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 74% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 26% of the time

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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 23% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

October 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

November 2024

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

October 2024

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

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vCloud Director

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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

October 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: October 2024.

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