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Microsoft Azure vs vCloud Air comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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

Microsoft Azure
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
324
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (1st)
vCloud Air
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 8.4%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure8.4%
vCloud Air1.1%
Other90.5%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Sylvain CAILLAU - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Director / Market Evangelist at CAST Software
Effective public cloud deployment enhances operational flexibility with room for cost management improvement
I am not having enough experience to answer what the room for improvement is for Microsoft Azure, but maybe not only in the technical aspect. The design could be a little bit better, the technical support could be better, and the price could be even cheaper. We still have to manage the cost and the FinOps activities, which I see is demanding before we can be sure of a good choice. When it's done, it's acceptable, so could it be made easier to do? I don't know, but it is engaging us in some extra work. That's why I say not ten out of ten, but only eight out of ten.
it_user613995 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora
With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.
All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use the cognitive service, virtual machines, and customer DB, and we like that Microsoft Azure is scalable and easy to install as well."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The user interface offers a good experience, it's better than Azure itself."
"The solution has high stability."
"Technical support has been extremely helpful."
"To store 5Gb of data, with 5Gb of egress and to issue 10 million transactions against that data would cost: £0.5105 per month."
"Enabling them to use OPEX spend just to utilize what they need when they need it at a low cost, was super valuable to them."
"Managed storage capabilities, which create a very simple way to create, copy, and replicate local or geo-replicate, it's very simple to assign workloads."
"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."
"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."
"VMware Workstation has an interesting feature to manage vSphere infrastructure (and also stand-alone ESXi hosts) that is really powerful and useful, for example to avoid to install the vSphere client (or the integration plugin) just to open one VM console or to change the power status for some VM."
 

Cons

"The solution's email hosting pricing could be improved."
"Virtual networks might be improved by adding more rules for the validation of protocols and peripheral elements in security assurance."
"One key area for improvement is the Azure load balancer. Currently, it only supports virtual machines (VMs) running in the same virtual network (vNet) on the backend. They should definitely support machines or IPs running on-premises (prem) or in other Azure VNets. GCP and AWS already support that. So, Azure Load Balancer should support that as well"
"Sometimes there is slowness observed in Microsoft Azure. We noticed a few critical servers went down due to a Microsoft Azure-end hardware issue."
"It could be more open to external solutions. Integration with other ecosystems would be beneficial."
"To give a rating of ten out of ten, the speed of technical support needs to improve because the time cycle from raising a ticket to resolution can stretch up to a month or two, which is very long; otherwise, I do not have much negativity about the product quality."
"However, we've had issues with Databricks auto-scaling, where it sometimes spun up more clusters than needed, incurring extra costs."
"Predictability and quality need improvement. Make sure things work predictably, as expected, and are documented."
"It’s a really good idea, but the current implementation is very limited: you can simply see your VMs and just open the VM console."
"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."
"I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not an expensive product and is adaptable to various requirements. It offers a free tier for small-scale usage and the ability to scale up as needed when requirements grow."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution, which could be cheaper."
"It's a pay-as-you-go subscription."
"The pricing model can be improved because we find that Azure pricing is a bit high."
"The price of the solution could be cheaper."
"Azure's pricing could be more competitive. Some clients mentioned that they are considering switching to AWS because of the price."
"It is important to consider ROI when looking at the cost of a subscription."
"The price is good, but it can always be cheaper."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business141
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise153
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
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Also Known As

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: September 2026.
912,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.