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VMware Cloud Director vs vCenter Orchestrator 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
6.0
Medium to large enterprises gain ROI from virtualization, but quantifying returns is challenging; vCenter Orchestrator suits specific needs.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Cloud Director offers varied ROI, balancing fast efficiency gains with high costs and mixed customer support experiences.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
VMware support is praised for communication and resolution but needs faster response and deeper expertise in some cases.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's service is praised for helpfulness and documentation, though technical support experiences mixed reviews regarding efficiency.
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
7.3
vCenter Orchestrator effectively scales from small to large environments, adapting well despite some hardware-specific challenges.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director offers robust scalability for diverse cloud needs, praised for rapid provisioning and high user capacity.
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
7.9
vCenter Orchestrator is highly stable, reliable, and efficient, with occasional issues, praised for trustworthy performance by users.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is reliable and resilient, though some integration issues exist; users generally report high stability and performance.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

vCenter Orchestrator requires affordability, interface improvements, better integration, automation features, simpler workflows, and accessible support and resources.
VMware Cloud Director needs better third-party integration, enhanced features, improved GUI, stable components, and clearer documentation.
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

Enterprise users have mixed opinions on vCenter Orchestrator pricing, with some finding it expensive due to complex licensing.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but offers unique features and flexibility, with potential discounts mitigating expenses for some users.
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

vCenter Orchestrator offers seamless automation, easy integration, scalability, user-friendly interface, and cost-effective virtual machine management.
VMware Cloud Director provides secure, scalable cloud management with multi-tenancy, automation, and seamless integration for diverse enterprise needs.
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

vCenter Orchestrator
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (8th)
VMware Cloud Director
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

vCenter Orchestrator and VMware Cloud Director aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. vCenter Orchestrator is designed for Process Automation and holds a mindshare of 0.3%, down 0.3% compared to last year.
VMware Cloud Director, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Management, holds 5.6% mindshare, down 7.6% since last year.
Process Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
vCenter Orchestrator0.3%
Camunda24.8%
Temporal7.4%
Other67.5%
Process Automation
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director5.6%
VMware Aria Automation9.8%
Morpheus7.7%
Other76.9%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gerhard Gmelch - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhance automation efficiency with cost-effective graphical workflow design
I use vCenter Orchestrator for automation purposes, specifically to run automation workbooks The most valuable features are the graphical UI for designing the workflows and the interfaces that come out of the box. Additionally, it is included in the VMware Vitalization Stack, which means there…
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
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about vCenter Orchestrator?
The stability of the product is very good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Orchestrator?
We're running a low-profile budget. This is not our main focus on investment technology, so we're trying to reduce costs due to the change from perpetual to subscription licenses.
What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?
For our environment, I do not see any areas of vCenter Orchestrator that could be improved or enhanced. We are currently satisfied with the orchestrator. If any improvements are needed, I will prov...
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

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Beiersdorf Shared Services
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, BMC, Temporal Technologies and others in Process Automation. Updated: August 2025.
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