We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."
"The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."
"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"
"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"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 think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"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 needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
Cisco UCS Director is ranked 23rd in Cloud Management with 13 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Director writes "A compact and flexible solution with a lot of features ". 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". Cisco UCS Director is most compared with Cisco Intersight, vCenter Orchestrator, VMware Aria Operations, Cisco CloudCenter and vCloud Director, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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