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.
"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."
"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 personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"The solution is user-friendly and intuitive."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"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 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"
"It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems."
"The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features."
"It is efficient and easy to manage. We can find what we need from the software's interface."
"Heat maps are valuable."
"The analysis features available with it allow us to do very high-level, enhanced root-cause analysis on events and issues that arise."
"It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems."
"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."
"We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment."
"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"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 initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
"We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible."
"The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network."
"VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) should improve instant monitoring. Currently, the monitoring is on an interval of five to ten minutes, if I want to know what is happening now I cannot."
"It was not intuitive and user-friendly in the versions leading up to 6.5."
"We would like to have monitoring for containers."
"There are some metrics that are not included in the canned set, that we've created. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect."
"The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool."
"The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time."
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, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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