Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 14 Cisco UCS Director reviews

595 Views
559 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 68 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,778 Views
2,334 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and Cisco UCS Director compete in the cloud services management category. VMware Cloud Director seems to have the upper hand due to its robust virtualization capabilities and extensive features that support both public and hybrid cloud environments.

Features: VMware Cloud Director offers a robust cloud services platform with extensive virtualization, scalability, and integration capabilities with public and hybrid clouds. Key features include vCenter Operations for monitoring and vSphere integration for seamless operations. Cisco UCS Director is integrated into Cisco solutions, providing centralized management for those environments, particularly beneficial in Cisco-heavy infrastructures.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could enhance user interface, platform maturity, and integration with public clouds. Users also raise concerns regarding pricing and version compatibility. Cisco UCS Director would benefit from improved third-party integration, more intuitive UI, and enhanced automation capabilities to expand its utility beyond Cisco-centric environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director supports various deployment models including public, private, and hybrid clouds, with generally strong customer service, though some report slow technical support responses. Cisco UCS Director emphasizes on-premises deployments, receiving positive feedback for its customer service but sometimes faces support challenges in complex settings.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director is viewed as costly, but justifiable given its extensive features and scalability, potentially offering a strong ROI through efficient resource management. Cisco UCS Director is also considered expensive, with high costs for software and support, offering less ROI due to limited built-in automation and significant development efforts required.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

July 2025

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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 UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

22nd

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.3%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair

Solution Architect and Senior Consultant at Keysight Technologies

Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement

Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."

"If a customer is looking for disaster recovery at a cheaper price, this is the best solution."

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

"It optimizes the process for cloud structure."

"The deployment is easy."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."

"vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure."

"The tool is very stable."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."

"Cloud Director has room for improvement in many areas. One critical thing that comes to mind is the hyperscalers. They could be more seamlessly integrated into the hybrid cloud."

"The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack."

"There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products."

"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."

"Lacks integration with the hyperscalers."

"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."

"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."

"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very 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."

"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."

"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 54% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 30% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 16% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 22% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 20% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

July 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

March 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

No data available

vCloud Director

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

VMware

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

July 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

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