We performed a comparison between VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: vROps is the winner in this comparison. It is simple to set up, efficient, easy to manage, and provides its users with valuable and accurate information.
"Our customers don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users."
"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."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now takes five minutes."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"We have faster delivery times through its automation."
"I can go back a little bit, a week or a month, look at the history, to troubleshoot."
"It does exactly what I program it to do at this point, which is to tell me if I've got machines running out of disk space or over-utilizing CPU or memory. The monitoring component of it is the most valuable feature."
"The reporting is a fantastic tool. It's a great tool for generating reports on different things, and for historically looking at performance metrics to help solve performance problems in an application stack."
"The built-in dashboards for troubleshooting are nice."
"We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it."
"It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues."
"We appreciate that this solution gives accurate reporting."
"I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost."
"Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"I would like to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."
"It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. Finally, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one."
"VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams."
"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."
"I want vROps to have wider compatibility with older hardware. In this country, many companies have older hardware, so sometimes we can't support all the newest features."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
"With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past."
"I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap."
"In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool."
VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, vCloud Director, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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