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.
"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."
"From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective."
"We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets."
"vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards."
"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."
"It has made a big difference in the time to troubleshoot. It's significantly reduced it."
"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."
"We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"It is highly scalable. We need to scale out and up, and we can do that with vSphere. We can easily add more storage, drives, or memory."
"There are no issues with the level of scalability you can achieve."
"The connectivity is fantastic, and many functions can run together in one server. If you need to scale, we can continue to add components or modules. It's a beautiful virtual solution that has many advantages over physical hardware, where you have to use devices and wiring to connect all your projects."
"It's very transparent and independent."
"Our customers opt for virtualization because it's cheaper and better than non-virtualized solutions. VMware is probably the best on the market now."
"Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features."
"We find the solution simple and efficient to manage."
"We would like easier customer reporting, because to do customer reports, we have to do a lot of programming."
"When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies."
"The prebuilt dashboards are easy to use, but if you want to create your own, it is not so easy. It is the same for reports."
"In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better."
"As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network. That would make this solution better."
"One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment... It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment."
"In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool."
"It is sometimes quite hard to use. If I need details, there is a huge amount of information that I need to review. It isn't a three-click solution."
"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."
"The solution needs to improve its stability."
"It would be useful to have features like micro-segmentation, changing the mix as well as part of vSphere"
"In the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top."
"the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client, although it's getting there."
"Both the price and the licensing fee are expensive, especially for our clients with a smaller workload."
"Higher cost than other similar solutions."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
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.
