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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs CloudStack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CloudStack
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys
Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls
I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"The APIs for automation in CloudStack are excellent; everything is API-driven, and while the API is very rich and hard to learn, you can do everything you would want to do, including everything in the user interface and more."
"We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."
"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."
"Key features include stability, centralized management design that scales well, and transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers.."
"The platform is very simple to scale-out.​"
"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."
"This is one of the major products that help to handle all of the NFV Infrastructure management services (IaaS), and it has helped us to quickly gain understanding and feel more powerful with respect to virtualization."
 

Cons

"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources."
"The web UI can be improved. It is too complex, and not trivial for the average user."
"After Citrix divested CloudPlatform to Accelerite, commercial support was absolutely atrocious."
"The product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway."
"The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn."
"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."
"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."
"Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"​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."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
14%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...
What is your primary use case for CloudStack?
My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...
 

Also Known As

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
Vmops, Cloud.com
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
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