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Microsoft Configuration Manager vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Microsoft Configuration Manager enhances productivity and efficiency, with users valuing its operational streamlining despite Mac support challenges.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director improves client provisioning, resource control, and efficiency, but opinions vary on its long-term cost-effectiveness.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.5
Microsoft Configuration Manager's customer support is generally effective, with better experiences from higher-tier and premier support options.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's support is praised for effectiveness but criticized for delays, improving complex case handling, and communication.
Most of the time, we have to raise the case with the vendors such as HPE or other providers, but in case of VMware Cloud Director or any other VMware product, 70-80% of problems we can easily troubleshoot by leveraging public documentation and the available KB articles.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Microsoft Configuration Manager efficiently scales across environments, supports high user numbers, integrates with Intune, and aids cloud transitions.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director excels in scalability, enabling efficient workload management and integration, highly rated for large-scale deployments.
The product is suitable for our size, handling 800 devices.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
Microsoft Configuration Manager is stable and reliable, requiring configuration and maintenance, with issues often stemming from external factors.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is highly rated for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and interoperability challenges during deployment.
There were misconfigurations by our team rather than issues with the product itself.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Configuration Manager needs a streamlined interface, better integration, enhanced automation, improved scalability, and simplified remote management.
VMware Cloud Director needs improved integration, GUI, search, interoperability, cost options, automation, and features found in competitors.
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.
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Configuration Manager is costly, especially for setup and licensing, but justified by robust features and integration capabilities.
VMware Cloud Director is pricey but offers extensive features, with flexibility options for cost-conscious buyers against major cloud competitors.
The setup cost is considered sufficient.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Configuration Manager streamlines IT processes with automation, integration, scalability, and comprehensive system management features for enterprises.
VMware Cloud Director offers scalable, user-friendly cloud management with strong integration, automation, and multi-tenancy for private and hybrid environments.
The product valuable for deployment recovery.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Configuration Man...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Software Distribution (1st), Server Monitoring (6th), Configuration Management (3rd), Patch Management (1st)
VMware Cloud Director
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Microsoft Configuration Manager and VMware Cloud Director aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Microsoft Configuration Manager is designed for Server Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 5.2%, down 7.7% compared to last year.
VMware Cloud Director, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Management, holds 6.0% mindshare, down 7.5% since last year.
Server Monitoring
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

MikeNelson2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deployment recovery works well but requires configuration improvements
While I do not use the product frequently, many issues were due to configuration rather than the product itself. I cannot give an exact recommendation as it is not my area of responsibility. The team that uses it finds it adequate. It is presently good enough for us not to investigate other options. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
How to choose between ManageEngine Desktop Central and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM)?
ManageEngine Desktop Central is very easy to set up, is scalable, stable, and also has very good patch management. What I like most about ManageEngine is that I can log on to every PC very easily a...
What do you like most about SCCM?
One of the standout features of SCCM is its application management capabilities. It allows us to create packages efficiently and deploy them to specific groups within our network. This streamlined ...
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM ), Microsoft SMS
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bank Alfalah Ltd., Wªrth Handelsges.m.b.H, Dimension Data, Japan Business Systems, St. Lucie County Public Schools, MISC Berhad
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
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