Cisco Intersight vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

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IBM Logo
5,386 views|2,494 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Cisco Logo
2,189 views|1,763 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
VMware Logo
6,793 views|3,692 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Intersight and VMware Aria Operations 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: May 2024).
787,033 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be.""Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good.""We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall.""The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature.""The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'""It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently.""I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software.""Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."

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"Cisco Intersight has valuable features for workflow automation and inventory administration.""The product has good integration.""The tool helps to manage Cisco servers.""Provides an overall view using a single portal.""Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure.""Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up.""We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one.""I like Intersight because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud because Intersight is the IO module."

More Cisco Intersight Pros →

"vROps is more user-friendly than some other products that we've seen on the market. It was very easy for our technicians to pick up. The search functionality works well. It makes it easy for our technicians to get down to a workload that they're possibly having an issue with.""Getting firsthand information in the environment straight to the people that would respond to those actual alerts and events, in real time, versus a phone call or having to play catch up after the events happened.""I would rate this solution a seven. We don't use it enough for me to give it a ten. There's a lot of value to it but we don't fully exercise it. It's a great product depending on what everyone's needs are.""The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow.""From an admin and operations perspective, the solution is intuitive and user-friendly.""The most valuable features for us are some of the trending and analysis on workloads. It doesn't just look to see if something is maximized at 100%. It figures out what the normal is for the application, so it's not just if something is maxed out and causing a problem, but if something is higher than normal or running outside of its normal range. This helps us to identify something that other products might not necessarily note as an issue.""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.""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."

More VMware Aria Operations Pros →

Cons
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines.""They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date.""It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines.""They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list.""The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups.""After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system.""The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens.""There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

More IBM Turbonomic Cons →

"The product could be easy to use.""It's a very complex solution.""An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities. Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release.""In the future, the solution needs to plan on an extension to cover a broader range of objects since, at present, there are some Cisco devices within the range of Intersight UCS that it can't manage.""The unique problem with Cisco Intersight is that it's not supporting some players.""The usability must be better.""When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs.""Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement."

More Cisco Intersight Cons →

"It's complex to manage because there are a lot of options and metrics. It's complex when you want to do something very specific.""We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license.""We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex.""For me, the technical support is the biggest problem. I've been working with them since 2016 and in the first years their response was faster than it is today. That is a problem. Also, I need to put together and send them a lot of information. And then I wait one day, two days. The support has been getting worse over the last few years. They need to improve it.""The solution can improve by offering more flexible integration with other platforms or products, such as Hyper-V or Azure. Not everyone uses VMware. It would be beneficial to have a more open-source concept for integration, creating more visibility across multiple clouds.""At first, it was not so user-friendly because there was so much information that we were lost.""It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.""Administration and growth can be improved."

More VMware Aria Operations Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
  • "Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
  • "What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
  • "Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
  • "You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
  • "Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
  • "If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
  • "It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
  • More IBM Turbonomic Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
  • "It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
  • "Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
  • "You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
  • "The product is cost-effective."
  • More Cisco Intersight Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
  • "The pricing: It's expensive."
  • "Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."
  • "I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
  • "We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."
  • "Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable."
  • "vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."
  • "As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well."
  • More VMware Aria Operations Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company… more »
    Top Answer:I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add… more »
    Top Answer:I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs and… more »
    Top Answer:Intersight can validate our environment.
    Top Answer:We used the solution's automation capabilities, but it wasn’t easy. It was part of why we took some time to deploy the… more »
    Top Answer:We use the solution for server management across various locations.
    Top Answer:vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you… more »
    Top Answer: In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex… more »
    Top Answer:For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
    Intersight
    VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations
    Learn More
    IBM
    Video Not Available
    Cisco
    Video Not Available
    Interactive Demo
    Cisco
    Demo Not Available
    VMware
    Demo Not Available
    Overview

    IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by customers to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years. Ready to take a closer look? Explore the interactive demo or start your free 30-day trial today!

    Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

    VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

    VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

    VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

    • Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.

    • Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.

    • Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.

    • Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

    VMware Aria Operations Features

    The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

    • Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.

    • Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.

    • Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.

    • Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.

    • Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.

    • User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.

    • Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

    VMware Aria Operations Benefits

    VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following: 

    • The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

    • VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.

    • Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.

    • The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.

    • VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.

    • The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.

    • VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

    Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

    Sample Customers
    IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
    EXMAR, RapidScale
    Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Insurance Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Insurance Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Healthcare Company5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company17%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise77%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    787,033 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco Intersight is ranked 14th in Cloud Management with 10 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. Cisco Intersight is rated 7.8, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Intersight writes "Helps know whether a solution is deployed correctly, but the automation capabilities are difficult to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". Cisco Intersight is most compared with Cisco UCS Manager, HPE OneView, VMware Aria Automation, Cisco UCS Director and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth. See our Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations report.

    See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Management 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.