IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

IBM and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. IBM holds a 1.1% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.6% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

IBM Spectrum Computing

Read 9 IBM Spectrum Computing reviews

538 Views
355 Comparison Views

57% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 69 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,738 Views
2,273 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Computing

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Cloud Director are competing products in data management and virtualization. VMware Cloud Director holds the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and high user satisfaction, making it a better investment despite IBM Spectrum Computing's competitive pricing.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing provides workload management, high-performance computing, and robust support for complex environments. VMware Cloud Director offers advanced virtualization features, seamless multi-tenant support, and integration with other VMware solutions, demonstrating its adaptability to diverse cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing could simplify its overly complex clustering compute resources and improve the ease of use for less experienced users. Additionally, expanding its integration capabilities with third-party tools could boost its market presence. VMware Cloud Director could enhance its data protection and disaster recovery features, improve cost efficiency, and continue evolving its user interface for even better user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director simplifies deployment with extensive documentation and excellent customer service, enhancing user experience. While IBM Spectrum Computing offers reliable support and straightforward deployment, it may require more system knowledge.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing features competitive pricing and strong ROI, attracting cost-conscious users. VMware Cloud Director, although requiring a higher initial investment, offers significant ROI with its extensive features and scalability, making it appealing for organizations seeking long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing 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

IBM Spectrum Computing

Ranking in Cloud Management

26th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (6th)

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 September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.6%, down from 7.6% 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	5.6%
IBM Spectrum Computing	1.1%
Other	93.3%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

OmarIsmail1

Infrastructure Technical Specialist II at Clicks Group

Senior Technical Specialist appreciates intelligent workload management, strong support, and scalability

The best features of IBM Spectrum Computing are common across many of their storage products. The software is solid, meaning that the code is stable. They take business seriously, which is what IBM stands for - International Business Machines. They always maintain a business-oriented approach in their software development. It's not simply clicking through interfaces; in IBM software, they consider their actions, process flows, and workflows around business processes. It requires understanding IBM and their methodology, as the software operates accordingly. I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature. We use Insights, which is connected to the cloud. This provides AI capabilities for analyzing the configuration, offering smart recommendations on new code, warning about bugs in current code, and suggesting configuration improvements through its advisor tool. The predictive analytics feature in IBM Spectrum Computing enables optimal software performance through Insights. However, being a storage administrator requires foundational knowledge and understanding beyond these tools. For troubleshooting, it's efficient in spotting bottlenecks, but understanding the terms and metrics is essential as it provides answers that need interpretation.

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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.

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

"The comparison was challenging, but the IBM Spectrum Scale offered a balanced solution. Our engineers rated itsanalytics capabilities equally high as Pure Storage. For workload management, Spectrum Computing provided effective solutions that met our needs. Workload management is part of a complete solution that uses different tools. There were the cloud and HPC parts; within HPC, there were parts like liquid cooling, simple computing, storage, and orchestration. The orchestration team handled the workload management."

"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."

"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"

"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."

"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."

"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."

"Easy to operate and use."

"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."

More IBM Spectrum Computing pros

"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."

"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."

"The solution is reliable and performs well."

"We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."

"They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy."

"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."

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

"vCloud is a good platform for visualization. It is very handy for monitoring. VMware can integrate with all monitoring systems like vRealize, and the management monitoring is good. I'm very happy with VMware. VMware is good in management and monitoring systems."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."

"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."

"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."

"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market."

"We have not been able to use deduplication."

"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."

"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."

"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."

More IBM Spectrum Computing 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."

"vCloud Director isn't cheap."

"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."

"In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced."

"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."

"vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync."

"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."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."

"This solution is expensive."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

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

"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."

"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."

"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."

"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."

"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

No data available

Computer Software Company

19%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

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

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM Spectrum Computing consistently offers competitive pricing. When solutioning new implementations, IBM always presents the best solution and price. In a recent comparison with Pure Storage and N...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM Spectrum Computing had limitations with remote copy services between head office and disaster recovery sites. In the last year, IBM has improved the code by re-engineering it to policy-based re...

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What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Computing?

The typical use case for IBM Spectrum Computing is that it's an all-rounder. It can be used in various scenarios, such as the retailer I work for that has batch processing. It's on-demand when perf...

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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...

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Comparisons

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 36% of the time

Cloudera Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 25% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 20% of the time

Morpheus vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 20% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Computing Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 19% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Operations 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

Hadoop

August 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

August 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing

vCloud Director

Overview

IBM Spectrum Computing uses intelligent workload and policy-driven resource management to optimize resources across the data center, on premises and in the cloud. Now up to 150X faster and scalable to over 160,000 cores, IBM provides you with the latest advances in software-defined infrastructure to help you unleash the power of your distributed mission-critical high performance computing (HPC), analytics and big data applications as well as a new generation open source frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark.

IBM

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

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Cloud Director

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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