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Spot vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 8, 2025

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 Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Spot
Ranking in Cloud Management
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (14th), Cloud Operations Analytics (3rd), Cloud Analytics (3rd), Compute Service (9th), Containers as a Service (CaaS) (6th), Cloud Cost Management (7th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spot is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.6%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Manpreet_Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Used to manage Kubernetes infrastructure, but it doesn't have support from OCI
Spot Ocean is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend the solution to other users. You need to have an experience with Kubernetes, or else this product is of no use. It is not difficult to learn to use Spot Ocean. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure
The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application workflow."
"The solution offers both block access and file access, making it a nice solution for customers."
"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."
"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."
"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."
"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."
"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."
"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."
 

Cons

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"The solution doesn't have support from OCI, and it should start working to onboard OCI."
"There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify."
"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."
"The integration between components could be improved."
"The tool needs to add more features to improve the console."
"We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading."
"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"vCloud Director isn't cheap."
"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider the pricing to be high."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
Information not available
"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"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."
"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
25%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about Spot Ocean?
The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application ...
What needs improvement with Spot Ocean?
There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify.
What is your primary use case for Spot Ocean?
Spot by NetApp is primarily used for backup and also for Fiservware.
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 sin...
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...
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 e...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Spot Ocean, Spot Elastigroup, Spot Eco
vCloud Director
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Freshworks, Zalando, Red Spark, News, Trax, ETAS, Demandbase, BeesWa, Duolingo, intel, IBM, N26, Wix, EyeEm, moovit, SAMSUNG, News UK, ticketmaster
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Spot vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.