VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Apr 4, 2022

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Some vRA users say the initial setup is straightforward, while others say it is complex. Most vROps users say that the initial setup is straightforward.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability. vRA users say that it has extensive automation capabilities. Several vRA users would like to see improvements to vRA’s multitenancy management.

    vROps users say it is user-friendly, has informative dashboards, impressive reporting tools, and accurate analysis abilities. A few users note a lack of flexible integration options.
  • Pricing: Reviewers of both products say their prices are high.
  • ROI: Reviewers of both products report seeing an impressive ROI.
  • Service and Support: Reviewers of both solutions are for the most part satisfied with the level of support they receive.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
Answer: vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applications, infrastructure, and multiple clouds. The tool aggregates large amounts of data, both in the cloud and on-premises, into one tool so you can easily analyze the performance of the infrastructure. What do we like the most about vROPs? The What-If Analysis feature is very useful for new workloads. It allows you to evaluate the impact of the workload before releasing it into production. We also like that it is user-friendly and intuitive; it is easy to generate reports, for example. The alerting capabilities are also great. When there is an issue at the disk leer, the system sends an alarm. The support is very good, but the documentation can be confusing. There should be more features in the standard version. Also, licensing is expensive. VMware vRealize Automation provides infrastructure automation for private and multi-cloud environments on the VMware cloud. It allows users to optimize secure software states across virtualized or public cloud. The tool automates day-to-day tasks and is very scalable. Another feature we liked is the role based access control (RBAC). It helps automate cloud operations, which saves a lot of time for developers. We found the automated timeout session sort of annoying, though. It automatically times out after half an hour. The setup is kind of difficult, too - especially the IAAS server. Conclusions vROPs is better suited when you need usability and easy management of large datasets. It is well architected and provides reliable virtualization and management across environments. It is easy to use and very scalable. VRA is a good solution for automating daily tasks, but is not so suitable for large or complex projects.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Our users can order VMs using the API.""value; It does a lot of things automatically that would take our group, when we're already strapped for time, a lot of time to go through and clean stuff out of databases and the like.""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 benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value.""The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future.""It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions.""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.""It is very stable, especially for high availability features."

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"The most valuable feature is that everything is integrated for monitoring, performance, and troubleshooting.""Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important.""The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow.""Their technical support is good. We haven't had too much use for them.""One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed.""We can actually use it to expand on other aspects of it by adding additional packs is really good.""I rated this solution an eight because it's intuitive and easy to use. The features that it'll bring us are tremendous""We have all the information that we need in one place and don't have to search for our monitoring tools everywhere."

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Cons
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good.""VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time.""They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful.""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.""Upgrades are always a pain.""They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator.""Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved.""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."

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"I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap.""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.""I would like to see them add a little bit more functionality and the ability to create more dashboards.""A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at.""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 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.""They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps.""Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
  • "I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
  • "Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
  • "We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
  • "The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
  • "There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
  • "vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
  • "As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
  • More VMware Aria Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
  • "The pricing: It's expensive."
  • "Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."
  • "I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
  • "We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."
  • "Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable."
  • "vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."
  • "As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well."
  • More VMware Aria Operations Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over… more »
    Top Answer:When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company… more »
    Top Answer:I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often Social organizations Financial institutions and… more »
    Top Answer: In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with… more »
    Top Answer:For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more… more »
    Top Answer: My company pays for VMware Suite license because we use many products from this brand and this solution is included in this package as well. If you use more than one or two products by VMware, then… more »
    Ranking
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    Also Known As
    VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
    VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations
    Learn More
    Overview

    VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features. 

    VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

    • Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.

    • Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.

    • DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.

    • Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.

    • Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

    VMware Aria Automation Features

    VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

    • VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

    • Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.

    • Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.

    • Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.

    • Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.

    • Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

    VMware Aria Automation Benefits

    VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

    • VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.

    • The solution offers high levels of security and control.

    • This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.

    • VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.

    • The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.

    • The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

    An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

    VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

    VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

    VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

    • Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.

    • Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.

    • Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.

    • Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

    VMware Aria Operations Features

    The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

    • Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.

    • Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.

    • Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.

    • Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.

    • Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.

    • User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.

    • Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

    VMware Aria Operations Benefits

    VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following: 

    • The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

    • VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.

    • Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.

    • The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.

    • VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.

    • The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.

    • VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

    Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

    Sample Customers
    Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
    Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company18%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise78%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 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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    We monitor all Cloud Management 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.