We performed a comparison between vCloud Director vs VMware vRealize Automation vRA based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware vRealize Automation vRA wins in this comparison because scalability is not an issue like it is for vCloud Director, and because users have been very satisfied with the ROI.
"There are various options for scaling and that flexibility is a good option."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice."
"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."
"The solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter."
"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."
"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."
"The most valuable features are the multi-tenancy and multi-site configuration."
"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."
"The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team."
"We've just shifted to an Agile development so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are."
"Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
"Database services need to go beyond what they are currently doing."
"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."
"The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack."
"Lacking additional services reduces the level of cloud integration companies just love with Amazon and Azure."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."
"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
vCloud Director is ranked 6th in Cloud Management with 62 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. vCloud Director is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of vCloud Director writes "Offers flexibility of handling workloads and good scalability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". vCloud Director is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, CloudStack and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. vCloud Director report.
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