We performed a comparison between VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: vROps is the winner in this comparison. It is simple to set up, efficient, easy to manage, and provides its users with valuable and accurate information.
"Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen."
"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."
"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."
"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"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 provides my team the awareness to see what's going on with the nodes and the clusters. It will then either rebalance them or allow the automation to rebalance them for 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."
"It helps an organization quickly create test and dev environments for developers to come up with new software and patch tests."
"It has helped improve the quality of service to users. It's made sure that we don't have servers that are over-subscribed with storage that starts to end up being at the minimalist points."
"What we do, as a whole for our group... is storage virtualization and the compute side. This product brings all those pieces into one interface and now we can actually correlate data between them."
"The most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance."
"vRealize has products created especially for virtualized infrastructure by VMware. Its main features are great."
"I have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and vRealize automation. After integrating vRealize, we tried to split and combine the logs from the login sites for more alerts and information to organize the whole infrastructure and have automation. We used many different types of scripts trying to orchestrate them all together into one solution, replacing, for example, Elasticsearch and some other scripts."
"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"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."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there."
"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."
"One thing I don't like is, all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a number one, is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes."
"I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards."
"It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard."
"The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts."
"One of the most valuable features was the cluster modeling, but they took that away... They keep saying that it's going to be back in the next release and that's what we're looking for. We really want that back."
"One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment... It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment."
"When we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions... We have some 3000 applications."
"One of the things that we've been limited on is that it only monitors one cluster at a time. We're spread out all across the US. It would be nice to monitor multiple clusters from one instance. That would be the main thing we'd like to see."
VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, vCloud Director, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and SaltStack, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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