Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Sponsored
 

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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
Ranking in Cloud Management
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (3rd)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.0%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. 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. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Panomporn_Meesangeam - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrated with the personal files and knowledge management processes but is expensive
The customer is a company in Thailand. They use Nutanix Cloud Clusters for file sharing and integrate with personal file share and knowledge management. Our customer attaches a file service with a login and connects with WiFi for cloud content, such as second documents or email access files…
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"Having a single pane of glass where you can have both your on-prem and anything else that you spin up within AWS is useful."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its quick configuration and installation."
"In terms of dealing with our business-critical workloads, Nutanix is a highly scalable, highly resilient, and very high-performing solution."
"It's easy to use, the UI is easy to configure, and it supports snapshots and backup integration."
"Its performance and speed are valuable. Its performance has helped me reduce costs."
"Our previous solution was inconsistent and took a long time to recover. NC2 consistently delivers full disaster recovery in a few hours. That was a huge selling point. We need to know that our business can be up and running in hours, not days. We didn't have a real disaster recovery plan before NC2. That's a goal we've been trying to achieve, and Nutanix gives us what we need to make that a reality"
"The overall infrastructure is the most valuable part of Nutanix Cloud Clusters."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Clusters are Prism Central, Micro-segmentation, and cluster scaling automation."
"We were using VMware, also combined with AirWatch and Boxer. We configured corporate emails on mobiles and used them for MDM applications on tablets, like the launcher."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. 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 solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter."
"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."
"What I found most valuable in vCloud Director is the multi-tenancy."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
 

Cons

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"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."
"Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"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 one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"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."
"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"Quality control needs to regulate the price-quality ratio."
"It should not be so expensive. Its price is high, but at the same time, it does give the results it offers."
"We've had some challenges with the implementation."
"There are still some things that could be improved about the product."
"The biggest weakness with Clusters at this point is that the adoption rate is low because customers don't know enough about it."
"In the current version, we've noticed many false positives when we check the alerts in the morning. For example, it told us that services stopped working, but there was nothing wrong when we checked it out. We've already raised the issue with support. They told us it's a bug in the version we use. We're about to upgrade to the recommended version, so it should be fine."
"The interface organization can be better. If we can, for example, organize virtual machines by groups, folders, and sub-folders, it will be easier to administer and monitor."
"When you go to the configuration part on the Nutanix site, the information is a bit high-level."
"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."
"The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack."
"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."
"There are too many errors, it could be more stable."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
"The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"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."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"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."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"There are positives and negatives to licensing. It all makes sense now, but it took a while. When the licenses first changed, it was a bit confusing."
"The licensing model of Nutanix is complex."
"I feel that the prices could be improved, but the truth is that I am very happy. The license price keeps increasing, but I am confident that it is much more reasonable than other brands."
"I am working on one configuration that is priced at $50,000 USD, whereas another one that I'm working on is estimated to cost $250,000 USD."
"The licensing portability can be very interesting. At the moment, I am working with Nutanix Appliances with the AHV as a hypervisor. I did not have a chance to ask for portability between platforms, but it will be good if you can have portability between multiple types of platforms."
"The price is high."
"The solution's licensing can be very pricey."
"The solution has been more costly at this point. We do not see any cost savings."
"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."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"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."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
The overall infrastructure is the most valuable part of Nutanix Cloud Clusters.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
It is more than five on a scale of price, considering it quite expensive. It's challenging to regulate the price-qual...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
It's more than expensive. Firecaster cannot limit IOP or throughput reading and writing. Quality control needs to reg...
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Nutanix Clusters
vCloud Director
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
The Home Depot, JetBlue, Hyundai, ShiftLeft
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.