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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Sangfor HCI offers cost-effective management and better returns, but ROI varies based on usage and user experience.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Cloud Director offers varied ROI, balancing fast efficiency gains with high costs and mixed customer support experiences.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Sangfor HCI customer service is largely praised for responsiveness but occasionally faces language barriers and documentation concerns.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's service is praised for helpfulness and documentation, though technical support experiences mixed reviews regarding efficiency.
Most of the time, we have to raise the case with the vendors such as HPE or other providers, but in case of VMware Cloud Director or any other VMware product, 70-80% of problems we can easily troubleshoot by leveraging public documentation and the available KB articles.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Sangfor HCI is praised for scalability and adaptability, though faces challenges with power consumption and component mismatches during updates.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director offers robust scalability for diverse cloud needs, praised for rapid provisioning and high user capacity.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Sangfor HCI is highly stable with minimal downtime, though some report compatibility issues and occasional crashes, depending on implementation.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is reliable and resilient, though some integration issues exist; users generally report high stability and performance.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Room For Improvement

Sangfor HCI needs improvements in performance, compatibility, security, interface, third-party integration, ERP compatibility, and support services.
VMware Cloud Director needs better third-party integration, enhanced features, improved GUI, stable components, and clearer documentation.
Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Setup Cost

Sangfor HCI offers cost-effective pricing and comprehensive features compared to VMware and Nutanix, with straightforward licensing.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but offers unique features and flexibility, with potential discounts mitigating expenses for some users.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Sangfor HCI offers scalability, data protection, and user-friendliness with robust features, enhancing security and simplifying management through its GUI.
VMware Cloud Director provides secure, scalable cloud management with multi-tenancy, automation, and seamless integration for diverse enterprise needs.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Categories and Ranking

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converg...
Ranking in Cloud Management
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
HCI (12th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 3.8%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director3.8%
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure1.5%
Other94.7%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

KashifAli - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Head, Director of Sales and Operations at Core ISP Router
User-friendly GUI, capable technical support team but complicated license mechanism
Sangfor HCI's license mechanism is too complicated. The license agreement is a distributed license. Within the HCI platform, Sangfor HCI has multiple licenses in terms of services. Sangfor HCI has a separate license for the security services, a separate license for the Doctor services, and application services. They have multiple SKUs in separate forms. As per local market requirements, I think they need to couple up these or bundle up the license model.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sangfor HCI?
I rate the pricing of Sangfor HCI at a five, as it is thirty to thirty-five percent more efficient than other solutions in terms of total cost of ownership.
What needs improvement with Sangfor HCI?
I would like Sangfor to have a presence on some public cloud offerings, such as Azure or AWS, to build disaster recovery sites. This functionality is currently missing in the Pakistani market.
What is your primary use case for Sangfor HCI?
The primary use case for Sangfor HCI involves running all workloads that were not for SAP on conventional servers using Hyper-V. We migrated all of these instances from Hyper-V to Sangfor HCI. We a...
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 single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
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 years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
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 example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TOSHIBA TEC Singapore, J&T Express Indonesia, Crowne Plaza Vietnam, Hermina Hospital Indonesia
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.