We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Operations based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets."
"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."
"We use the product to minimize downtime, as well as be in a position to plan for future growth."
"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."
"It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see."
"The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great."
"One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us. It is also user-friendly and intuitive."
"The ease of installation and configuration is the most valuable feature, especially for VMware and the cloud."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5."
"If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial."
"One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that."
"In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation."
"It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc."
"We would like better integration with the cloud because we use a multi-vendor cloud. We use AWS, which is fine, but we also use Azure and Google. We would like better plugins to those other two providers."
"The one thing that I am always missing is training specific to Horizon. There is no training class you can go to for the Horizon add-on for vROps. I'd like to see specific training for Horizon admins, as opposed to general vSphere admins."
"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."
Cisco UCS Director is ranked 22nd in Cloud Management with 13 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Director writes " Enables centralized management, but the tool is complicated and expensive". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". Cisco UCS Director is most compared with Cisco Intersight, VMware Aria Automation, vCenter Orchestrator, vCloud Director and Cisco CloudCenter, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism and Veeam ONE. See our Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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