We performed a comparison between Cisco CloudCenter, VMware Aria Automation, and VMware Aria Operations based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management."Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"You can scale it easily."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"The most valuable feature is, instead of doing the VMotion manually, we have automated everything with a script, using vRealize. That means I don't need to think about things like compatibility. The system will do everything for me and just give me a report."
"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."
"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases."
"I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU."
"The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly."
"Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization."
"What I find most valuable is its simplicity, which allows us to seamlessly migrate views from one physical server to another, be it due to resource overloads or transitioning from one set of disks to another."
"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."
"Instead of having a lot of people spend time doing manual tasks, it allows us to have dashboards and instantly show us any issues that we have, rather than trolling through log files."
"It has helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."
"It has a learning curve."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."
"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."
"It's not cheap."
"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"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."
"The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations."
"We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end."
"One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that."
"It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better."
"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."
"There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware."
"The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network."