We evaluated Cisco ONE Cloud and Nutanix Calm. We were using VMware solutions in the past. We received good feedback about vRA and that is why we went for it.

Cisco had a lot of limitations on its networking. They needed their own virtual piece rather than any generic or VMware-default distributed switch. That was a major limitation. For the Cisco switch, they own the hardware layer so you need Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Cisco UCS doesn't have that much of a customer base, so the development would be slow and have even buggier fixes. Any release for bug fixes or patches would take time

The open source solutions are cheaper, but they lack documentation. They also have trouble keeping the documentation, drivers, etc. up-to-date.

Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC.

We did look at some automation around the Red Hat stack itself. Our environment tends to be larger on the Linux side than it is on the Windows side, the Microsoft side. So we did give some consideration to maybe automating through Ansible and some other processes. But because of the simplicity of development, relative to the other options, we chose vRA. We also chose it because of the integration with our vCenter. We wanted to be under vRealize. We wanted to be one consistent stack, whether it's monitoring, spinning up, security, or containers. We want to try to keep everything under one platform.

The solution is the best fit if you have a VMware infrastructure because it understands the native components. 

We do not see a similar product in the VMware infrastructure that works as good as the solution. 

I don't think we evaluated other solutions.

The engineering team evaluated a few solutions, but we went with vRA because it is the fastest and easiest.

We do regular technology refreshment from all our suppliers to be aware of the latest trends in the market and to select the most suitable ones which fit our needs.

We've been with vRealize Automation for a while now. 

OpenStack was pretty immature at the time that we were evaluating the solution. We also looked at Embotics and their stuff.

There are a lot of good options in this space. There is a lot of competition now. Do your due diligence around it. The VMware solutions stand on their own, but look around. Know what you are after: 

• Are you after infrastructure? 
• Are you after multi-cloud? 

Everything has a different focus.

We evaluated Hyper-V, that was a big failure. We looked at KBM, that was pretty good. We're using Acropolis Hypervisor right now. Everything is still primitive, but among the other ones, AHV from Nutanix seems to be the most stable functionally but it is still missing a whole lot of toolsets that you need. So we're not moving in that direction any time soon.

The other competitors are throwing everything at you for free but they don't have any management. You don't have the feature set that you have in vROps. vRA is much more sophisticated. You get what you pay for with VMware. You're getting all the feature set. Where everybody else is trying to give you stuff for free, they're harder to work with and then you spend more man-hours.

Compared to alternative solutions in this space, the feature set of this solution is unrivaled. I can't really think of anything else that has a better management platform, that would be as mature as this software.

While we evaluated other options, vRA made it easy and quick for us to go with this solution as an existing VMware customer. With new products, there are training implications. Also, VMware is one of the market leaders.

We usually look at least three other vendors minimum. 

We chose VMware years ago. We have also had Hyper-V and KVM. So, we've had different products from different vendors. However, now, we are down to just VMware, because it's very stable and reliable.

We conducted studies on other options. We found other possibilities that were cheaper but so far this is what's working well for us and as of now we don't want to change. 

There are always features that could be added. I've looked at other solutions such as Turbonomic. They check a lot of the same boxes, but I prefer the VMware interface and usability.

We are currently looking at CMPs which give the functionality that support VMware and Google Compute Cloud, as well as Azure.

VMware is not the only solution that we have. We also have Huawei's version of virtual machines. But VMware is our leading solution.

Prior to my arriving on the team, they compared this product to OpenStack and KVM.

We analyzed the market. We also looked at OpenStack, which is similar in its functionality to vRA. We chose vRA because of its integrations. Integrations were more difficult with OpenStack.

We evaluated other solutions, VMware was one of many that were looked at. The main reason we chose VMware and VRA was because it's a vendor that provides the whole stack, the whole ecosystem of solutions. We didn't want different products from different vendors, we wanted a full stack. 

We already had VMware, it was a logical step to choose this solution.

We looked at VMware. We looked at AWS automation capabilities, but at the end of the day we decided to go with VMware, because VMware was an all-in-one platform that we could use.

We looked at a couple of other vendors but we went with VMware because VMware is standard. Why not go with the best?

We haven't really looked at a lot of competitors. We do use SCCM, which isn't really a competitor, but it's a different type of management. It seems that vRA works a little bit better in the vSphere environment because it can connect to all the other VMware products really easily.

Rubrik is one we are looking at. And the whole AWS Hybrid Cloud is definitely on my roadmap.

DynTek. We used Presidio as well as ServiceNow.

No, we were just doing manual builds and deployments. We did not consider any other vendors that I'm aware of.

At the time, there wasn't really any competition when we decided to go this route. It was really only VMware.

We did not evaluate anything else. We have so many VMware products that it was a logical conclusion for us to chose this one.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

We assessed the market. We looked at VMware, Cisco, and a third vendor. VMware came out on top because of the integration. The service that we were providing the most is a virtual machine. So, it made more sense to use a VMware product to provide a VM machine.

It was always going to be VMware, because that's our primary virtual machine deployment. 

We were initially thinking about vCloud Director but we're a VMware shop so we wanted something that is native to VMware technologies. We didn't approach a lot of other vendors. One of the things that is important for us when selecting a vendor is whether it fits in with our footprint or not.

There were not too many on our list. VMware was the natural fit. We saw the automation. We liked it. Chef, technically, will do automation. It has connections into VMware. We preferred having the VMware automation handle it. Chef will do it, but it doesn't have as many things. We would have had to write a lot more tools for it. It's one of those things where, instead of Chef's being the one tool to rule them all, where we do that for everything, we branched out to VMware automation to handle its subset.

Jenkins is a Swiss Army knife. It will do literally everything. The problem is that you have to tell it to do everything. You have to build all of the features into it that you want. There's a language to do it, but it just says, "here's the entire toolbox, do whatever you want." It doesn't have as many pre-packaged things. VMware has the ability to build things, but it has a lot of things preconceived, which is very handy. If I just need the basics, I need to stand up some VMs, it already has those workflows built in. Jenkins doesn't have nearly as many things built in. They can both expand to what we need, but VMware had some pre-provided things that were very handy to get off the ground quickly.

No, we were happy with what they demoed, and what they showed us.

I think the support and the feedback that we got from the salesperson, the response time that we got, we were really happy with it.

Not applicable. The company already had the product when they brought me onboard.

We evaluated Cisco UCS Director.

We also evaluated CA.

We chose VMware because we are a VM shop and the product allows multiple endpoints. We could also have endpoints for AWS.

No, we're using vRA and other VMware products.

We are embedded with VMware. We also use OpenStack, but it requires a lot more investment from IT.

We did not evaluate other options.

Support, cost, and functionality are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor.

VMware was the only one that we actually looked at because the other option was OpenStack; we weren't going with OpenStack.

This solution is easier to set up than the alternative we looked at. The other one wasn't as powerful. If I were an automation ninja I could do much more with vRealize than the other solution I evaluated. 

UCS Director is the other main product I have used, but it's always vRA that I go to.

VM was the only one we really looked at.

I wasn't a part of the decision-making process. I know VMware was one of the top choices.

No, I've never been involved in the selection of this product, but I've actually joined teams that have already chosen to use it. I know some of the competition. Some of the other products have on from being the VMware vCloud Director. Some of the products are heard suggested via other places, like answerable and telethon.

I was not part of the evaluation process.

I haven't had the opportunity to use many comparable products.

We did utilize vCloud Air. It was one of the other tools that we did try out.

Now, I don't like to talk bad about VMware, but it was a disastrous product. It was vCloud Director, which I was familiar with, but the supportability was not there. There were some bugs whenever we were trying to do automation and workloads between our on-premise into the vCloud Air. That was the one thing we were trying to utilize, and it just didn't work well.

Then, the other automation solution we were using Chef and Puppet (and other things) for our DevOps tools, but we really wanted to shift more focus to the developers. They don't want to have to command-code out everything. Some of them want to just go, "Click, click, done."

When I went through the first demo of vRA, that's when I saw that this product would be a very beneficial product for our company.

No other options were evaluated. It is all based on the requirement, whichever problem you are trying to solve. A lot of the times the stuff I deal with is more on the enterprise side (larger). The product has been stellar. 

I have used the SMB Market as well; small media markets without issues. 

Microsoft.

No, we have been using VMware suite for a long time and we are pretty much comfortable with it.

Yes. HPE.

No, we are a partner with VMware so that was our choice.

We did not look at alternatives; this is the ultimate product.