We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Automation 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."The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day."
"If you do a deployment for a proof of concept, it is simple."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"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."
"Now the customer can manage their own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."
"The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"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."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."
"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."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."
Cisco UCS Director is ranked 24th in Cloud Management with 13 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Director writes "A compact and flexible solution with a lot of features ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Cisco UCS Director is most compared with Cisco Intersight, vCenter Orchestrator, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director and Cisco CloudCenter, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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