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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
325
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (1st)
vCloud Air
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 8.6%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure8.6%
vCloud Air1.2%
Other90.2%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Rafath Noor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Cloud platform has supported reliable growth and collaboration but customer support still needs improvement
In my opinion, the best features Microsoft Azure offers are the scalable solutions and serverless solution, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. There are categorized services I can get. Based on my need, I can use and get most of those things. Regarding Microsoft Azure's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security are fine and the AI is consistent and I was able to get reliable outputs. Governance and security-wise, I was also satisfied with the performance, encryption-wise and the data transmission, transparency-wise. Regarding Microsoft Azure's AI capabilities, output-wise, the outputs are very much reliable, so I can depend on those things. There's nothing more to add and I am satisfied with the accuracy because it's more than 90% accuracy that I can find. That's fine for me.
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

"This is a product that is fast-growing and they are gaining popularity."
"Microsoft Azure is scalable in my experience."
"The most valuable feature is the virtual machine."
"Microsoft Azure is a very good product."
"The pricing is great, as we only pay for what we use."
"Azure allows us to bring applications to life quickly."
"Setup cost with Azure is minimal for what they are supplying."
"The performance of Azure DevOps services is really impressive."
"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."
"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."
"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."
 

Cons

"There could be more documentation and video tutorials to incorporate each and every feature. This way one can easily get the knowledge and implement it."
"The solution lacks fluidity and is not intuitive."
"Monitoring options should be more sophisticated, as there are dashboards on which a end user is able to pin a lot of charts and a number of web parts, but for example, I would love to have some option like in Operational Management Suite."
"The security must be improved."
"The solution’s stability could be improved."
"They're already doing quite a bit. I'm not unsatisfied with anything that they're doing right now. They can maybe make the transitions a little smoother and improve its pricing. The pricing for the end-user packages is a bit high."
"Compared with other cloud solution providers, Microsoft is not good at local support."
"The cost is a big issue, it can quickly go up if you don't control things."
"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."
"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 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

"We have an annual license subscription to use the solution."
"Price could always be cheaper. Its licensing and usage aren't always cheap. We pay monthly."
"There is a monthly fee you need to pay for the use of Microsoft Azure."
"Their licensing costs might be a little bit lower, compared to AWS, but I'm not sure. I think we get licenses, especially on long-term projects, on a yearly basis. It could be cheaper."
"Azure costing can be multi-layered."
"The pricing is relatively high."
"The price needs to be lower because they're competing with AWS."
"I rate the product price a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
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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
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business142
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), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: October 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.