We performed a comparison between CloudStack 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."It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."
"You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules."
"We like the virtualization capabilities."
"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."
"Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits."
"CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
"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."
"Our customers don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users."
"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."
"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"We have faster delivery times through its automation."
"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."
"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."
"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."
"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."
"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."
"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."
"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."
"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."
"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."
"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."
"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."
CloudStack is ranked 12th in Cloud Management with 29 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. CloudStack is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CloudStack writes "A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability". 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". CloudStack is most compared with OpenNebula, vCloud Director, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Cloudify, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director and Morpheus. See our CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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