We performed a comparison between CloudStack 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."When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."
"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."
"I have been impressed by CloudStack's most recent updates around Kubernetes. In particular, they have worked with Kubernetes to support the Cluster API, and you can now easily integrate Kubernetes into CloudStack and get access to a lot of good features."
"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."
"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."
"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors."
"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."
"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."
"With the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment."
"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."
"The extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"Our users can order VMs using the API."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."
"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."
"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."
"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."
"I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved."
"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."
"The Windows hosts do not get their hostnames from cloud-init."
"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."
"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"I want to see HTML5. I want to get rid of JavaScript... we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side."
"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 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."
"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people who we call to get support for it."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
CloudStack is ranked 12th in Cloud Management with 29 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. CloudStack is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CloudStack writes "A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability". 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". CloudStack is most compared with OpenNebula, vCloud Director, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Cloudify, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director and Morpheus. See our CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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