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.
"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 DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent."
"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"Troubleshooting is one of the most valuable features for us. It identifies problems that other monitoring solutions are giving us, offers us insight into the problem and then digs into it and finds out what the actual problems are and addresses them."
"It tells us when there's an issue with a particular VM or host. It gives us a remediation in order to fix that problem. For example, if there's a shortage of memory or a shortage of CPU, things of that nature, it tells you how to correct that issue."
"With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us."
"It visualizes stuff better, so we can pinpoint or see problems"
"The most valuable feature is the metrics, the ability to deep-dive into any issue we may be having from a virtual machine to a data store. Latency is a big thing - it's able to give us that metric pretty swiftly. And with our custom dashboards, it's all readily available."
"We have all the information that we need in one place and don't have to search for our monitoring tools everywhere."
"It is easy to use from its deployment architecture to use cases. It is straightforward for customers to use. It's a good product and better than the earlier versions."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"I don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version."
"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing."
"I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard."
"I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation."
"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."
"Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother."
"It's getting better from what it used to be but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find."
"One thing I don't like is, all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a number one, is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes."
"Sometimes it's difficult to find some features like they were in previous versions."
"While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process."
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 SaltStack, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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