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 are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now takes five minutes."
"It is also intuitive and user-friendly... With vRealize, we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations."
"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."
"It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment."
"It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. The platform and add-on solutions are straightforward."
"For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production."
"There are many valuable features. The top feature is historical trending analysis and future workload predictions. There's a workload forecaster/predictor model in there and it's very helpful for capacity planning."
"Its ability to resolve an issue from within the application rather than going somewhere else to resolve it."
"It provides optimization recommendations for data centers, cluster workload migrations, and vSAN."
"The tool helped the organization in all monitoring tasks when being delivered as a service for customers helps them to generate early alarm templates, being a cloud service provider is delivered as part of the IaaS to generate memory consumptions processing and storage additionally can be configured parameters such as networking and services that are configured on virtual machines."
"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."
"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."
"I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."
"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."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."
"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."
"I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point."
"Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial."
"They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more."
"It was not intuitive and user-friendly in the versions leading up to 6.5."
"The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation."
"The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex."
"Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have."
"I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together."
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, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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