Compare CloudStack vs. VMware vRealize Automation (vRA)
CloudStack is ranked 5th in Cloud Management with 17 reviews while VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 70 reviews. CloudStack is rated 7.6, while VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CloudStack writes "User-friendly, scalable, and easy API use ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) writes "Enables us to flex up or flex down the environment quickly; makes our DevOps processes more consistent". CloudStack is most compared with OpenNebula, Red Hat CloudForms and VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), whereas VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is most compared with vCloud Director, Red Hat CloudForms and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). See our CloudStack vs. VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) report.
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 Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and other solutions. Updated: January 2020. 396,515 professionals have used our research since 2012. | |||||
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | |
You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules. CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team. The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development. CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions. CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure. It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows. It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution. Key features include stability, centralized management design that scales well, and transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers.. | The most valued feature is the streamlining of the DevOps process, automation and orchestration. It provides the ability for the entire Dev lifecycle to actually be incorporated into a single stream. 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 initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy. Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware. The setup was complex in many ways. The first reason is that we have many teams who work on it so it gets complicated gathering all of the people. The second reason is that it can be complicated to install it quickly, within a reasonable amount of time. The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well. We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good. The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T |
Cons | |
I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance. There are some minor things that can be improved even more such as, perhaps, a bit more polishing on the GUI side to catch up with the API possibilities (which are really extensive) but otherwise nothing critical. A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot. 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. Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private. The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn. VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect. It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network. | 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. in general, it took us a long time to get it off the ground. We had a lot of issues upfront and we determined that we just needed to scrap it. I think we scrapped it two or three times before we actually got it built the way we wanted, and we're still not where we need to be. We have had downtime. There have been some issues, but we're also two iterations behind on version. The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately. The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful. 7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product. 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. It's not cheap. I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | |
There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services. As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion. The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase. Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer. | It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands. A simplified version for small businesses would be good. We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment. As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will. There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them. vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products. The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market. We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server. |
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Ranking  | |
Views 3,371 Comparisons 2,030 Reviews 17 Average Words per Review 384 Avg. Rating 7.5 | Views 17,045 Comparisons 9,869 Reviews 69 Average Words per Review 614 Avg. Rating 8.0 |
Top Comparisons | |
 Compared 46% of the time.  Compared 17% of the time.  Compared 12% of the time. | Compared 23% of the time. Compared 13% of the time. Compared 11% of the time. |
Also Known As | |
| Vmops, Cloud.com | VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite |
Learn | |
| Apache | VMware |
Overview | |
| Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. | VMware vRealize Automation automates the delivery of personalized infrastructure, applications and custom IT services. This cloud automation software lets you deploy across a multi-vendor hybrid cloud infrastructure, giving you both flexibility and investment protection for current and future technology choices. Agility Through Automation Automate the end-to-end delivery and management of infrastructure, and accelerate application deployment and releases. Choice Through Flexibility Provision and manage multivendor, multicloud infrastructure and applications by leveraging existing infrastructure, tools and processes. Personalization Through Governance Policies Ensure that users receive the right size resource or application at the appropriate service level for the jobs they need to perform. Efficiency Through Cost Containment Provide consistent, automated delivery and management of IT services and reduce time-consuming, manual processes. Reclaim inactive resources for reuse with automated reclamation, providing cost savings. |
Offer | |
Learn more about CloudStack | Learn more about VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) |
Sample Customers | |
| GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000 | Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual |
Top Industries | |
Comms Service Provider38% Software R&D Company25% Media Company12% Government5% | Financial Services Firm20% Healthcare Company16% Retailer10% Comms Service Provider10% Software R&D Company43% Comms Service Provider15% Pharma/Biotech Company7% Government6% |
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and other solutions. Updated: January 2020.
396,515 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See also CloudStack Reviews, VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) Reviews, and our list of Best Cloud Management Companies.
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