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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 6.4%, up from 4.4% 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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Declan Fleming - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 9, 2022
We can look at all accounts with one dashboard and save a ton of money by having awareness of how we're spending
Some of the UI is a little clunky. They do listen when I tell them about this, but one thing that drives me insane is that it defaults to a cumulative view of how much you've spent, as opposed to day-to-day. Even when you've selected day-to-day, you have to turn off a cumulative switch. They've done some work on fixing that in the UI, but I don't know why they're thinking that way and why they think people would want to look at it that way. The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask. It could probably have a nice warning page for all the things. Not for me, not for the big administrator, but for all my users to whom I give accounts so that they can look at their own things. It would be helpful if they had a landing page that just said, "Hey, you're losing money here. You're possibly losing here or there." It expects you to have a certain amount of knowledge of what you're doing when you first come in. It does have a dashboard, but it's very esoteric. Something just right on top that says "You're bleeding cash right here," and a graphic would be nice. If I want to set up a new account, there's no API. It's all done by hand. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand. We would like to be able to report how busy our machines are so that if a machine has been sitting there idle all week, we should turn it off. Sometimes, it's not just how busy the processor was, it's also about how much RAM was being taken up when that thing was running. Often, it can run low CPU and high RAM, and we still have to keep it running because of that. There is this arcane workaround to get that to work by installing something special on the individual machines one by one. Deploying that way is very arcane. I wish there was a better way of doing that. It seems it works with CloudWatch, at least on AWS, or CloudTrail, to do it, but I don't know for sure. They probably would've done it if it was easy, but it would help a lot if, in the deployment, it also was aware of memory usage, not just CPU usage by default.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"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."
"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."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"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.""
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"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."
"Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier for technicians than VMware, so fewer people are needed to do the same tasks. It's critical because if we do things faster, we do them at a lower price, especially if we use fewer human resources."
"The most valuable feature for me is being able to find a machine, regardless of which cluster it's located in, as quickly as possible, and being able to work on it. A lot of times we are called upon to troubleshoot an issue. That usually means there's a problem that needs quick attention. Being able to find machines, ascertain their status, and do so in a timely manner, are processes that are very critical to our business needs."
"The solution’s ease of use is mind-blowing."
"The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times."
"The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products."
"It has allowed us to easily manage multiple clusters in multiple locations through Prism. We have multiple sites that we use to manage and run VMware at which could be a bit cumbersome with Vsphere. Since we made the migration to Nutanix we now only have active servers at three locations, and we can manage them through Prism Central with ease."
"It has been helpful for forecasting and planning. It has also been helpful for analytics. With the help of this solution, we can have a better understanding of how much storage we are utilizing and how many processes are currently in use. Based on this information, we get a better understanding of how much expansion we need going forward, which is very important because ultimately it saves cost. It simplifies operations and helps with more revenue and productivity. It brings stability to our production environment. With the help of forecasting and capacity planning, we can achieve all of our long-term organizational goals."
"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."
"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."
"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 product's initial setup phase was easy."
"The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation."
"The tool has a self-provisioning feature, which helps us manage projects easily. The solution is easy to use, secure, and reliable."
"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor."
"Nutanix has room for improvement around the partner tools and making them approachable and easier to learn."
"Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database. Despite our efforts to encourage them to move to a different database, the company's 25 years of code and data basic make it difficult to do so. We are open to any level of support or guidance that can help us manage the Sybase database, even if it's not a fully managed solution. Direction on how to scale, improve, and optimize tables and queries within Sybase would be greatly appreciated."
"For Nutanix, there are options to go with different types of hardware vendors for using the AOS operating system. We can deploy it on Dell, Lenovo, or IBM servers. If Nutanix had its own server, it would be good."
"We need to get more training and achieve much more consistent training. There is training, and there are courses, but in local terms, we are missing something that would allow us to have a more widespread training program."
"We have a lot of projects so we cannot always dive deep into the material that Nutanix offers. We would like to but we have other priorities. It was a busy year. We have an external company that does things for us so we can make the process go faster. We know what we need and what we would like to achieve. I'm still on the learning curve."
"The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen."
"The web interface could be improved at some points."
"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."
"Initially, the setup was complex."
"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."
"This is very simple in OpenShift. We are happy with vCloud in terms of the virtualization but not for redundancy and distribution."
"In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good."
"For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure."
"The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well."
"The tool is expensive."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
"Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager's pricing is fair at the moment."
"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"I believe the pricing is reasonable."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
39%
Educational Organization
20%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
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...
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using an...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the produ...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvemen...
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 Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
vCloud Director
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.