Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.7, while Broadcom is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.4% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.4% mindshare. Additionally, 73% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 15 Cisco UCS Director reviews

602 Views
572 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 69 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,657 Views
2,205 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 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

20th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.4%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director	5.4%
Cisco UCS Director	1.4%
Other	93.2%

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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KuldeepSingh4

Technical Solution Architect at HCLSoftware

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

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

"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."

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

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

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

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"vCloud Director is a stable solution."

"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."

"The product's initial setup phase is easy."

"Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process)."

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."

"The stability of the product is better than just 'good.'"

"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

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

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

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

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

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"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."

"The tool's price is one of the challenges we faced with the solution, making it an area requiring improvement."

"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."

"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."

"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."

"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."

"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."

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

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The cost of this solution is significant."

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

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

"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."

"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 price of the solution is expensive."

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

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

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

"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."

"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."

"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."

"This is an expensive solution."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	36

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?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

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

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 27% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 27% of the time

Morpheus vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 20% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

October 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

October 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.

Broadcom

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

September 2025

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