We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director, CloudStack, and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management."Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."
"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."
"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."
"You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules."
"The platform is very simple to scale-out."
"CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions."
"My company could implement a lot of customizations and integration with load balancers and DNS. When we started using CloudStack, we didn't have that integration, so we developed that. We could fix anything missing in the solution."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments."
"value; It does a lot of things automatically that would take our group, when we're already strapped for time, a lot of time to go through and clean stuff out of databases and the like."
"We've just shifted to an Agile development so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"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."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of automation."
"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."
"Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything."
"Companies need to be knowledgeable about cloud technology. It's not for novice users."
"The product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway."
"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."
"I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources."
"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."
"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."
"There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"I would like them to improve the product training."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features."
"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."
