Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Red Hat CloudForms 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.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Operations

May 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.9%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 2.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 9.3%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Unique Categories:

Cloud Migration

12.9%

Virtualization Management Tools

14.6%

No other categories found

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

Feb 6, 2024

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

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Nitesh Jadhav

Principal Solutions Architect at Tech Mahindra Limited

Mar 16, 2020

Mature, with good technical support but needs to be more user-friendly

The integration with other open-source tools is pretty good. It integrates particularly well with Kubernates Docker. They are a very mature product Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite…

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it_user245385

Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Operations at a agriculture with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 8, 2016

It helps me consolidate leads in a cluster versus adding new clusters.

During initial setup, it actually gives a lot of false alarms, so that's one aspect that can be improved, but that's why you have to tweak it to get the right type of metrics. If it were more agile and more self-descriptive, and in fact, scripted in a way that it just goes and self-installs, and then you specify certain metrics for configuration, that would be awesome. Also, it needs to catch up with the times. The user interface is really buggy and slow. I'm not sure if it is now on HTML5 or not, but I'm hoping it would be in the latest release. I do not have any experience with version 6 and later. My last experience was at 5.5. From that standpoint, other improvements would be some intelligence monitoring, and intuitive reporting. Machine learning, if it's integrated with the capabilities of vROps, would be awesome. For example, why should I set an alert at 65% for one environment and 75% at the other, when it might change or fluctuate from time to time. If there's machine learning and it automatically knows the optimum level, that would be awesome. Half of the configuration pain gets cut down right there.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."

"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."

"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"They are a very mature product."

"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients. It has been working fine and seamlessly for them. Its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."

"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."

"I am impressed with the product's reports."

"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."

"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."

"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."

More Red Hat CloudForms pros

"We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it."

"Like most organizations, our training budgets are tight. Without an intuitive product like vROps, we wouldn't be able to get the insight that we do into our environment on a day-to-day basis."

"The ease of installation and configuration is the most valuable feature, especially for VMware and the cloud."

"It has helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues."

"In the process of doing benchmark performance analysis, instead of going into PowerShell or the VMware or CLI, we're able to have vRealize provide that GUI that gives us that information up front, without the delay of scripting it."

"Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great."

"It removes the guess work. It gives me real data and analysis in a very user-friendly way that I can show to my management without going deep into numbers."

"It has improved our organization with respect to allowing us to size our environments correctly. We get metrics about what our stuff is actually using, how we can scope for future projects, where can we save some resources."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."

"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."

"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."

"The solution is still quite immature."

"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."

"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."

"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."

"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."

"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."

More Red Hat CloudForms cons

"In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful."

"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."

"Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach."

"If I had to think of one thing that could be improved, I would probably lean towards making it easier to pull dashboards from vRealize Operations into other products, like a company-branded dashboard that would display in a NOC."

"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."

"If the cost of the license could be cheaper, it would be good."

"One of the things that we've been limited on is that it only monitors one cluster at a time. We're spread out all across the US. It would be nice to monitor multiple clusters from one instance. That would be the main thing we'd like to see."

"When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."

"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."

"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."

"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."

"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."

"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."

"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."

"The pricing is a little bit expensive. Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved."

"We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price."

"Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly."

"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."

"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Comms Service Provider

24%

Computer Software Company

18%

Media Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company be...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can a...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs a...

See all answers

What do you like most about Red Hat CloudForms?

I am impressed with the product's reports.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat CloudForms?

I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat CloudForms?

I would rate the product a four out of ten since its implementation is not as good as it sounds.

See all answers

What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...

See all answers

Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly compl...

See all answers

What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they i...

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Morpheus vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 29% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 20% of the time

vCloud Director vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 18% of the time

OpenNebula vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 9% of the time

More Red Hat CloudForms Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 15% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

Veeam ONE vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

June 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms

June 2024

Download Red Hat CloudForms product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

May 2024

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations

Learn More

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IBM

Red Hat

VMware

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Red Hat

Demo not available

VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by customers to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years. Ready to take a closer look? Explore the interactive demo or start your free 30-day trial today!

Manage container, virtual, private, and public cloud infrastructures

Managing a complex, hybrid IT environment can require multiple management tools, redundant policy implementations, and extra staff to handle the operations. Red Hat® CloudForms simplifies IT, providing unified management and operations in a hybrid environment.

As your IT infrastructure progresses from traditional virtualization toward an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, CloudForms evolves, protecting your investments and providing consistent user experience and functionality.

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

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)

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

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Operations

May 2024

Free Report: Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Operations

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.

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