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 main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"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."
"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"Our speed of provisioning has improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template... and it takes about 20 minutes."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"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."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative."
"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 know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
Cisco UCS Director is ranked 24th in Cloud Management with 6 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 16 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Director writes "UI and integrations should be improved; version control is problematic". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Good stability, supports a hybrid model and easy to use ". 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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