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VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Cloud Management
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (13th), PaaS Clouds (12th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Service Mesh (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

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.
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.
DarshanChaudhari - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling
I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"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.'"
"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 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 most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"It helps ensure security across our cloud environments."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
"The stability of the product is better than just 'good.'"
"The tool has a self-provisioning feature, which helps us manage projects easily. The solution is easy to use, secure, and reliable."
"The solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter."
"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."
"I have found the solution scales well."
"VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten."
"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."
"A feature we find valuable is that other products can also be integrated with Mission Control. This means that we can see the status of specific clusters, as well as view the monitoring application logs all from one point."
"We never experienced any problems with scalability."
"The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good."
"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to check the flow of all the different variants within our applications."
"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the management functionality of the cluster life cycle. Additionally, the solution integrates well with other vendors, such as Velero for backups and Sonobuoy for compliance. Additionally, it works well in multi-cluster environments."
 

Cons

"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"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."
"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."
"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 old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"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."
"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."
"The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive."
"It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack."
"vCloud Director isn't cheap."
"We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product."
"The tool's price is one of the challenges we faced with the solution, making it an area requiring improvement."
"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"
"LYNX is a managed cluster solution that takes care of specific details within a cluster, such as sequences or services. I haven't seen this feature in Tanzu Mission Control."
"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."
"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."
"Tanzu could provide more granular control over whatever networking is being done on the containers. I would also like to see a slightly more detailed view of application-level tracing. I'm referring to the connections between different microservices. If they added a service-matching feature, that would be helpful for the customers to build or be more effective."
"This product doesn't have a GUI. In order to use it properly, I need to connect it to a new GUI or build a GUI to manage it — it's pretty difficult."
"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I believe the pricing is reasonable."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."
"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."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."
"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
 

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...
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...
Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is ...
What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Application Service?
The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good.
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Application Service?
Since I have a developer team, they use the solution for testing purposes.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
vCloud Director
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

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.
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Cloud Director vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.