We compared VMware Aria Operations and VMware vSphere based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions find them easy to deploy.
Features: Users of both products feel that they are fairly stable and scalable.
Users of VMware Aria Operations find its dashboards and interfaces to be intuitive to use. However, they are divided over how effectively it integrates with other products.
Reviewers of VMware vSphere find its integration capabilities to be highly effective. However, they feel that its storage management capabilities could be improved.
Pricing: Users of both solutions find them to be expensive.
Service and Support: For the most part, users of both products find their technical support to be effective.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, VMware vSphere seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers feel that the question concerning the effectiveness of VMware Aria Operations’ integration capabilities makes VMware vSphere a better investment.
"It has helped us to reduce the amount of VM sprawl, VMs that are not necessarily used. We can then reclaim resources such as memory, CPU, and storage."
"Most valuable features are the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers."
"The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow."
"The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them."
"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features."
"It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues."
"VMware vROps' most valuable feature is that it integrates well with our VMware infrastructure, which is helpful for us because we can closely monitor our VMs and their performance."
"When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information."
"Stability and scalability are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It helps to automate the data replication and DR (disaster recovery)."
"The most valuable feature of the solution would be the basic feature of server virtualization, we use it everywhere."
"We find the solution simple and efficient to manage."
"The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast."
"An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere."
"I definitely like the stability, performance and ease-of-use."
"Technical support is helpful and always available."
"They should have more automation features for database management."
"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."
"We have an Enterprise Plus license, so there's a long list of stuff that you get with the Enterprise Plus license, and I'd like to see a better integration of all the vRealize components."
"At the beginning, the stability was not that good. The latest versions are much better."
"It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. Finally, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one."
"At first, it was not so user-friendly because there was so much information that we were lost."
"On a specific version, it has been stable. But the whole point of the tool is historical data and, twice now, we have lost all of our historical data, as we've tried to move to the next version of the tool. That really removes a lot of the functionality that we've purchased the tool for."
"It's getting better from what it used to be but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find."
"It is not easy to upgrade VMware vSphere from an old version to a new version."
"I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need."
"It could use a smaller learning curve."
"The support is good, but it's slow."
"They can lower the price of its license."
"vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately it's always the little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want."
"The quality of support could be better."
"In future releases, I would like to see less pricing. The license can be improved."
VMware Aria Operations is ranked 1st in Virtualization Management Tools with 360 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, IBM Turbonomic, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM and IBM Turbonomic.
We monitor all Virtualization Management Tools 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.
