Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director 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 UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 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
"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.""Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features.""A product that really aids in systems management without complexity.""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.""This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use.""The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

More Cisco UCS Director Pros →

"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features.""It provides us with predictive analysis of the capacity, helping us plan the scalability of resources.""For me, the most valuable feature of vROps is its reporting. We use the reports to send information to certain groups within our company to help forecast the use of resources.""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 initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance.""The initial setup is very straightforward. It is very intuitive to install.""With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us.""The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed."

More VMware Aria Operations Pros →

Cons
"The product's pricing needs to improve.""Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable.""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.""We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure.""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.""I would like to see more integration with other solutions.""It is not easy to add or expand the product."

More Cisco UCS Director Cons →

"Administration and growth can be improved.""I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, it's an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future.""Our hands are tied by using this product. It is not as flexible as it could be.""The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly. They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the systems.""If I had to think of one thing that could be improved, I would probably lean towards making it easier to pull dashboards from vRealize Operations into other products, like a company-branded dashboard that would display in a NOC.""I would like to see them get a holistic view of the organization, not just focusing on the server and the state that it's running on but to widen that out from the end user all the way through. It's a key critical part but actually, it needs to bring outside of that, then to the networking elements and the inter-dependencies that are in hospital solutions.""I know that they talk a lot about AI and a sort of forecasting ahead of time. It's a good application, but it has to wait for a certain period of time to actually do an analysis. If it would give you that ahead of time, or even forecasting, it would be really improved.""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."

More VMware Aria Operations Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The cost of this solution is significant."
  • "Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
  • "I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
  • "On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
  • "The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
  • "I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
  • More Cisco UCS Director 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 →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
    Top Answer:I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product… more »
    Top Answer:Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand. If Cisco UCS Director is able to integrate with another product or with a server from… more »
    Top Answer:vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over… more »
    Top Answer: In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with… 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 introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more… more »
    Ranking
    24th
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    946
    Comparisons
    744
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    404
    Rating
    6.4
    2nd
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    7,915
    Comparisons
    4,308
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    457
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations
    Learn More
    Overview

    Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

    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
    Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
    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
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Energy/Utilities Company25%
    Retailer13%
    Government13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Government11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company18%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise7%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco UCS Director is ranked 24th in Cloud Management with 6 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 28 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. 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 Operations writes "Offers granular control over infrastructure, especially in environments using ESXi hypervisors and provides a standardized, centralized view for monitoring infrastructure". Cisco UCS Director is most compared with Cisco Intersight, vCenter Orchestrator, VMware Aria Automation, vCloud Director and Cisco CloudCenter, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Veeam ONE and Nutanix Prism. See our Cisco UCS Director 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.