We performed a comparison between VCenter Orchestrator and VMware Aria Automation based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware Aria Automation helps organizations improve IT agility, productivity, and efficiency to remain competitive and secure in the marketplace. Users feel it is a complete solution that is stable, easy to manage, and performs very well.
"The most valuable feature is how easy it makes it to manage the VM."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its good automation features."
"The DRS feature from VMware is very valuable to us because it balances workloads."
"We can manage and relocate resources easily."
"The open, flexible architecture has brought in the agile computing environment along with better Dr capabilities. Automation management and operational tasks across VMware and third-party applications, like our HMIS and other business productivity applications, have delivered peace of mind."
"The most valuable feature is affinity rules."
"The solution was easy to install."
"It's 100% stable, it's always stable. We haven't had any bugs. The solution works very well and we haven't had any problems."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."
"The automation function itself and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"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 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."
"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."
"I did not do the initial setup. However, it was complex at the beginning."
"The interface could be improved to bring greater user-friendliness and ease of use."
"Storage has room for improvement. It's a big problem for our solution. The interface also needs improvement, it should be simplified."
"Its technical support team takes a long time to escalate the issues."
"In the next release, to make it easier to write the workflows, I would l like to see more HTML GUIs."
"It is too expensive. One of the main issues is the price."
"I believe vCenter Orchestrator should be part of VMware vSphere's basic bundle. As a product, vCenter Orchestrator should not be licensed at all because the world has progressed way beyond what it can offer."
"I would like to see a greater ability to do mobile administration."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better."
"It's not cheap."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing."
"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."
"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."
"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."
vCenter Orchestrator is ranked 9th in Process Automation with 44 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 reviews. vCenter Orchestrator is rated 8.4, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of vCenter Orchestrator writes "Enables us to do administration on a centralized layer when using multiple VMware ESX servers". 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". vCenter Orchestrator is most compared with VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Cisco UCS Director, ServiceNow Orchestration and SaltStack, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and SaltStack.
We monitor all Process Automation 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.
