We compared VMware Aria Operations and VMware vSphere based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions find them easy to deploy.
Features: Users of both products feel that they are fairly stable and scalable.
Users of VMware Aria Operations find its dashboards and interfaces to be intuitive to use. However, they are divided over how effectively it integrates with other products.
Reviewers of VMware vSphere find its integration capabilities to be highly effective. However, they feel that its storage management capabilities could be improved.
Pricing: Users of both solutions find them to be expensive.
Service and Support: For the most part, users of both products find their technical support to be effective.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, VMware vSphere seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers feel that the question concerning the effectiveness of VMware Aria Operations’ integration capabilities makes VMware vSphere a better investment.
"Like most organizations, our training budgets are tight. Without an intuitive product like vROps, we wouldn't be able to get the insight that we do into our environment on a day-to-day basis."
"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."
"It removes the guess work. It gives me real data and analysis in a very user-friendly way that I can show to my management without going deep into numbers."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload. It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement."
"It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues."
"From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was actually happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily"
"It visualizes stuff better, so we can pinpoint or see problems"
"The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility."
"Performance; We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors."
"I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."
"It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution. It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic."
"Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward."
"The most valuable features are stability and support."
"Reduces downtime."
"It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSphere are backup and recovery."
"It requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces."
"The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement."
"In this vCenter, my wish is to establish a backup system that doesn't require VIN. It involves creating a backup ticket directly from the vCenter for the virtual machines and performing the backup task for each server, ensuring redundancy without the need for additional software. This would be a preferable solution if all of this could be accomplished within vCenter itself."
"The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it. There are some canned ones."
"I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier."
"There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that."
"I would like more application dashboards to be available."
"If you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Automation should be a bit more intuitive."
"I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why.""
"We have had some problems setting up the monitoring with vSphere. The process could be simplified."
"The implementation of VMware vSphere is easy. For integration companies, it's easy, the final client cannot do it alone but for an implementor it's easy."
"The biggest problem in this solution is the incompatibility of some of the features with some of the drivers installed on servers. For example, if I want to install vSphere on an HPE server, the driver is really different from a Dell server or a Fujitsu server. I need to download different drivers and install them manually, which can be improved by VMware. They can offer a special image to match different servers. We face different problems when we install vSphere on an ESXi server and have different drivers on the storage. ESXi cannot detect different kinds of storage, and they should improve this. We updated our existing version to vSphere 7 in a private environment, but it seems that this version is not very stable. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems. It would be good if VMware can offer specific applications for mobiles to enable us to control the management of all servers by mobile. They should also improve the vCenter GUI because it is currently not compatible, and there are a lot of problems. Some of the options do not appear well in the browser. VMware should spend more time resolving the problems in the GUI."
"The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose."
"I would like to see more support regarding containers, and they need more features for them."
"There should be a bit more flexibility in terms of the hardware we can use with the product."
"I would like more Amazon stuff inside of VMware."
VMware Aria Operations is ranked 1st in Virtualization Management Tools with 360 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and Veeam ONE.
We monitor all Virtualization Management Tools 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.
