CloudSphere vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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CloudSphere Logo
331 views|252 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
VMware Logo
8,238 views|4,830 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CloudSphere 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.
To learn more, read our detailed CloudSphere vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: May 2024).
770,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents.""For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access.""The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.""When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere.""Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."

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"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 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.""It provides visibility into the VM space.""It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running.""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 infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility.""Our speed of provisioning has improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template... and it takes about 20 minutes.""The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."

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Cons
"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data.""There are quite a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere.""The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies.""When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera.""The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."

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"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way.""The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better.""It's not cheap.""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.""Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation.""We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on.""Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one.""I would like them to improve the product training."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."
  • "The product is very expensive."
  • More CloudSphere Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
  • "I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
  • "Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
  • "We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
  • "The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
  • "There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
  • "vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
  • "As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
  • More VMware Aria Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.
    Top Answer:I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also access some of the integrated Active Directory and other integrated services related… more »
    Top Answer:We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provides a single console to manage everything, it would be more convenient and powerful… more »
    Top Answer:vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over… more »
    Top Answer:When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company… more »
    Top Answer:I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often Social organizations Financial institutions and… more »
    Ranking
    26th
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    331
    Comparisons
    252
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    682
    Rating
    7.8
    1st
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    8,238
    Comparisons
    4,830
    Reviews
    16
    Average Words per Review
    590
    Rating
    7.8
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    HyperCloud
    VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
    Learn More
    Overview

    CloudSphere is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables organizations to plan, optimize, secure, and scale their cloud adoption. The platform has three solutions to help organizations manage dynamic, multi-cloud environments, including cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and cloud security posture management. By using application intelligence (AI), the platform is able to discover and collect all of the data points that collectively define an application across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Because the solution is very scalable, it can accommodate companies of all sizes.

    The CloudSphere solution is ideal for:

    • SMBs
    • Enterprises
    • Government
    • ISVs
    • Managed service providers

    CloudSphere Product Highlights

    • CloudSphere has a unique data science approach to hybrid and multi-cloud cyber asset management that offers the only solution to automate the discovery and creation of a top-down, application-level graphical view of your organization’s cyber assets.
    • With its continuous application graphing, CloudSphere can save countless hours and provides the visibility to optimize your IT environment without triggering unforeseen business risks or disrupting other applications.
    • The platform’s visualization capabilities accelerate cloud migration, transformation, and modernization initiatives with real-time insights and optimization recommendations.
    • CloudSphere’s security posture monitoring minimizes cyber security exposure and reduces risk from misconfigurations.
    • Automating compliance monitoring for corporate policies and key industry standards makes reporting extremely easy. The solution’s context-aware policy engine builds on the platform’s continuous visibility capabilities to display real-time compliance status and reports.

    CloudSphere Features

    CloudSphere has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Access controls/permissions
    • Billing
    • Provisioning
    • Capacity analytics
    • Cost management
    • Demand monitoring
    • Multi-cloud management
    • Performance analysis
    • Service level agreement (SLA) management
    • Workflow approval

    CloudSphere Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing CloudSphere. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduce migration risk: With CloudSphere, you can migrate complex applications with agentless discovery of application interdependencies while optimizing for both cost and performance.
    • Manage your budget more efficiently: CloudSphere generates reports and provides alerts for cloud spend by group, department, project, or individual so you can keep your organization’s budgets on track.
    • Access controls: With CloudSphere’s visual maps, identity and access data is displayed to show who has access to key cloud resources.
    • Minimize attacks: The solution helps your organization establish better security and minimize cloud attack surface and your exposure window by using customizable risk scoring, remediation recommendations, and integration with 3rd-party reporting tools.
    • Ensure compliance: CloudSphere allows you to control cloud security risks and ensure compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with real-time visibility, continuous configuration monitoring, and user controlled auto remediation capabilities.
    • Comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications: CloudSphere gives you a comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications, regardless of your apps’ complexity, in order to provide optimization and accuracy throughout the migration process.
    • Policy-driven controls for cloud spending: The CloudSphere platform provides policy-driven controls for cloud spending along with visibility so you can properly budget for cloud usage and tie cloud infrastructure spending to business outcomes. The solution enables you to set and track budgets, configure alerts, allows users to take corrective action from trend reports, and helps you optimize cloud spending with continuous resource monitoring and rightsizing suggestions.

    VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features. 

    VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

    • Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.

    • Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.

    • DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.

    • Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.

    • Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

    VMware Aria Automation Features

    VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

    • VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

    • Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.

    • Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.

    • Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.

    • Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.

    • Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

    VMware Aria Automation Benefits

    VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

    • VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.

    • The solution offers high levels of security and control.

    • This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.

    • VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.

    • The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.

    • The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

    An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

    Sample Customers
    Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College
    Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    University6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise79%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    CloudSphere vs. VMware Aria Automation
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about CloudSphere vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    770,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    CloudSphere is ranked 26th in Cloud Management with 5 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. CloudSphere is rated 8.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CloudSphere writes "Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable". 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". CloudSphere is most compared with SkyKick Cloud Manager and Microsoft Azure, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our CloudSphere vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

    See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.