CloudStack vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Apache and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.3, while VMware is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. Apache holds a 6.3% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache 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 CloudStack 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 CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: September 2024).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack 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 CloudStack is 6.3%, up from 3.2% 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

Arun Dhanaraj

Vice President at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 1, 2023

Helps us optimize costs and allocate resources, but we need PaaS component optimization

The platform is continually updated with new features. If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers be more satisfied with the updates and push them into their environments. Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase. If they could provide those enhancements, that would be really great. For example, we are spending a lot of time on Azure Databricks, exploring it and trying to do cost optimization as well as setting up the policies. If Turbonomic could help us understand how much the Databricks CPU is using per instance or workspace, that would help us optimize it, scale it according to our business requirements, and decrease costs.

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Marco Sinhoreli

Technical Marketing Manager at ShapeBlue

Nov 6, 2022

Low complexity cloud management with ever-improving Kubernetes integration

We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there have been a lot of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now. For now, we have two versions per year, one being the LTS (Long Term Support) version, and the other is just for development. It's a very good platform for us at the moment, but one feature I would like to see is CloudStack for edge zones. This would enable us to use it for cloud edge computing, as well as enable search providers to use it to provide cloud service in edge zones, for example.

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PurwandiPurwandi

Senior Cloud Engineer at PT. Sigma Cipta Caraka (Telkomsigma)

Apr 12, 2024

Manage and onboard permission but has high cost

When scanning thoroughly, we integrate automation. It would be easier if VMware improved its capabilities. Then, we can implement autoscaling through the web interface. There is multi-channel support, yet Net Depot is used for security and monitoring. This is crucial if we expose profiles to the Internet for security reasons. We need to enhance security, especially in protecting vCloud Director. If anyone pushes or plugs in something, it could compromise customer access. VMware may be better prepared for security reasons. Two persons are required to maintain the solution. If we only have a small amount of resources, we'll opt for the public vCloud but if we have a large amount of resources like 100s, 1000s then vCloud Director might be a better solution. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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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

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."

"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."

"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 VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

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

"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.'"

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The back-end database design is simple and straight forward. The user interface is designed with external users in mind. Billing is relatively straightforward with this product. Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice."

"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors."

"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."

"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."

"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."

More CloudStack pros

"I have found the solution scales well."

"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."

"We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."

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

"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."

"We use the infrastructure as a service cloud, that is, we use the features as infrastructure for this. We are not using any platform services."

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

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

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

"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."

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."

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

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

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect."

"I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved."

"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."

"Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything."

"The Windows hosts do not get their hostnames from cloud-init."

"The product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."

More CloudStack cons

"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."

"There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products."

"We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading."

"Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."

"vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync."

"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."

"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."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."

"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."

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

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

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."

"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."

"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."

"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."

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

"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."

"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."

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

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

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Educational Organization

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

23%

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 CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is an open-source product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. It provides good value.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

The product had some limitations. So, I decided to write my own stack from scratch. The product does not have an easi...

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...

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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

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OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 67% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudify vs CloudStack

Compared 3% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 3% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 25% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 24% 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

ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

September 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

September 2024

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

August 2024

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Vmops, Cloud.com

vCloud Director

Learn More

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Apache

VMware

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Apache

Demo not available

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.

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

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.

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 2024

Free Report: CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.

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